My darling son,

On the night before your third birthday, I gathered all of your favorite things and spread them out to prepare the house to greet you in the morning. Everyone was there—the animals from your baby shower, the garbage and fire trucks, all the plush friends, your baby Santi, the full lineup of cars and Bluey characters, and all of the Ninis too. You wanted to make sure I invited Elmo and the Sesame Street friends for your big day, so I was sure to include them in the mix.

As you know, Chacha and Nina are the family event production team but since they were caring for baby Lola who recently arrived, your Mama was on her own to make the day special. And I was definitely nervous.

I worked a full day and after finally getting you down, I stood at the kitchen sink in the Mom Zone—that 9:30pm to 12:30am window when I do the mom magic. Cleaning, ordering everything we need, sending aunties voice notes, paying the bills, prepping everything for the next day. And if there’s anything you will have learned by the time you read this it’s that when your mama gets in a zone she is unstoppable.

But not this night.

As I washed the dishes, I felt a surge of emotions gather in my throat. I was feeling tired but my heart was pounding like I was nervous. And just as I looked at the clock, I realized it read 10:31pm nearly the exact time I looked at the clock on that very night three years earlier. My water spontaneously broke and it meant you were on your way before we completed 35 weeks.

My body was remembering.

Over the next several hours I assembled clusters of toys in party hats, blew up balloons, and hung streamers. But there was so much more happening. At nearly 12:30am I stepped down from a dining table chair and in a freak moment, an upholstery tack sliced my calf drawing blood. That was around the time we were in the hospital being told you would have to be born via C-section because of your breech positioning. And then, as I put the final touches on everything and reached peak exhaustion at about 2:45am—that is around the time you arrived.

I gave my all that night. And this one too.

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As I quietly crept into bed and said my prayers, I gave my usual thanks to God for the gift of you, for the redemption I experience in your very existence, and for the companionship that is unlike anything else I’ve ever lived. And then I inched closer to you so you could sense I was there. And as you always do—still sleeping—your body curled right into mine on instinct.

You see my son, we are connected across all timelines and through each of our senses.

We were literally embraced until the final moment they tugged you out of my body. You weren’t head down in position to exit. You were curled up high in my body, the way you now curl into me on the outside. I made it through the fog of these first three years because you have been with me every step—challenging me, yes, but more importantly, never turning away from me. In the earliest, most physically hard months, you allowed yourself to be cared for by our village without ever making me feel like I’d lost my place with you. I will never be able to thank you enough for that.

I know that we are paired to do big things together because they are already happening. Let me tell you about some of them. As you sometimes say to me – hands gently clutching my cheeks: “I’m so proud of you” (special shout out to Ms. Rachel for that).

We are shaping a branch for two on our family tree. Nothing more. Nothing less. Just right for us. And we’re building it on a foundation of learning to regulate our nervous systems through every moment, big and small. Imperfect at times, but always together, never stepping back from an opportunity to say two important words: I’m sorry.

There is a particular kind of safety in our energies. Your mama, a disciplined worker with eyes set on big goals and a plan to reach them. You, a fearless and spirited soul who is determined and caring in equal measure—and whom I trust to try even when the odds feel stacked against us. We are partners in this. I may be teaching you some of the ways of the world, but you are reminding me of the ways of humanity.

You walk with a confidence in people that makes me beam with pride. You make friends everywhere we go. Though I admit I fight back tears every time you approach a child at the park to play and they snub you. Somehow, even in those moments you assure me that rejection doesn’t dim your light. That is something I will fiercely protect as we journey together.

Above everything, we are never ever stingy on saying the three most important words to one another: I love you.

Every day with you affirms how blessed I am and how beautiful our connection has become in our first three years. I pray you continue to be protected and guided by the Creator’s light which I am so fortunate to witness as your mother.

I hope that someday you’ll find all the pieces I’ve written for you and for the mothers who read along with us. I hope they are like puzzle pieces, each one a snapshot of a landscape that when complete gives you a deeper understanding of who I am and why I showed up the way I did in your life. And I hope you read each one with curiosity and compassion.

If you ever doubt that you are divinely designed and chosen, remember the inspiration and meaning of your name: Breath, Wind, and Spirit of God. King of Peace and Order. Grand Nephew of Numa Pompilio Fonseca. Son of Carolina.

Happy Birthday, my sweet baby Numa.

Luz de mis ojos. Corazón de mi corazón.

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She is not the first mother to have lost her grip on reality. And this is not about the horrific acts that led to the deaths of her three children. Something about her is rallying women to step forward in an act of solidarity unlike anything I have witnessed before – something I am finding myself stepping into as well.

Each of us recognizes that three precious lives were lost on that January night in Massachusetts. But we’re also saying there was a fourth. And many of us are saying that that fourth life reminds us of someone we know.

At some point after doing the most miraculous and self-less act a human body can do, we lost ourselves. Some of us briefly. Some of us over extended periods of time. And regardless of the experience, it was disorienting, isolating, and often incredibly scary.

I’m not a medical professional or mental health expert. And I’m not trying to speak on legal matters given that the court I’m most familiar with is the one of public opinion. I’m the singular world expert on the child that is mine, and most of what I write is based wholly on my personal perspective and lived experience as said child’s mother in these barely three years.

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I haven’t been able to watch more than snippets of the Lindsay Clancy trial for various reasons, but mostly to protect my energetic space in a time when all of it is needed by my small human. I did catch a glimpse of Lindsay Clancy sobbing over testimony from a forensic specialist detailing the autopsy of one of her children.

I don’t know why, but it made me think of La Llorona.

If you don’t know her, La Llorona is a figure from Latin American folklore. She’s a woman who loses her mind when she is abandoned by her husband and drowns her children in a river before taking her own life. It’s said that, punished by God, her spirit roams the earth weeping inconsolably and calling out to her children.

In the version most of us were raised on, she goes mad from rejection. She becomes a monster.

But what if, like many stories, it was wrong.

Even if she had been real, she could have been a woman whose husband left rather than stay and support her through what we would now call a result of postpartum. What if she was a woman so overwhelmed by the weight of motherhood that she slipped and lost her footing entirely? What if postpartum psychosis drove her to do the unspeakable? What if she was a woman unraveling without a single person to hold her?

It doesn’t matter in lore - we inherited a story that made her a villain and maybe we should rethink that.

The crazy woman is one of the longest standing tropes of womanhood. It has been a match with which women are gaslit across cultures and generations. The idea that we are so inherently volatile and always on the brink is a tool of patriarchy meant to undermine even the most normal reactions like sadness and confusion and sickness in the magnanimous hormonal flush of postpartum.

Lindsay Clancy is being tried in a court room but La Llorona was convicted in the court of culture ages ago. And somewhere between them, are millions of mothers whose experiences were held in silence, sometimes held, sometimes treated, and many times not.

She and Lindsay are both mothers. Survivors of whatever postpartum experience they were dealt, with whatever resources they could grasp. And today, so am I. This is not an attempt to compare our stories. It’s about creating connection and resonance that holds space for compassion which is what most moms need and so rarely get enough of. Someone who says, I see you without having to know you.

Society will prepare you to receive and provide for a baby with a near-complete disregard for how you will need to prepare to release the woman you are, and to receive and provide for your new self right along with that baby. Regardless of what I’d prepared for, and in spite of the most amazing pregnancy, my son arrived by way of a C-section I had not planned and I was plunged into a recovery unlike anything I anticipated. I was blessed to have a village taking every step with me for months – almost as if taking breaths with me. And in spite of that the clouds rolled in.

I had heard some about postpartum depression and anxiety. I knew people who sought treatment even during pregnancy. But I didn’t realize when it made its way into my home. The sleep deprivation, the physical demands, and the sudden loss of my life companions Chico and Rico, created a perfect storm. Before I knew it, I was so deep in a fog I couldn’t see my hand in front of me or hear the voices around me clearly.

The woman looking at me in the mirror was familiar but not someone I knew well.

And the one word I could use to best describe my life experience was numb. A word that’s come up in a journal entry from the Clancy trial, and in the voices of women validating her experience.

There was something else for me I haven’t dared to say much about yet. As a woman who made the decision to be a single mother, I didn’t feel I had the right to say something was wrong. For months I hid the experience as best as I could – going through the motions while feeling gutted. And then my body told on me.

I lost a lot of weight. To some it looked like a natural response to breastfeeding - even celebrated as a speedy recovery. But more than a loss of appetite. I began to reject the idea of food entirely. My skin began to almost gray – I had never felt so pale in my life. The gestational gingivitis went away but damage required a root canal. I had bald patches around my head from alopecia. All of it physical manifestations of the turmoil inside.

The depths of sadness are hard to recall without a knot in my throat. I lost track of the times I cried myself to sleep. I kept the pain to myself and wouldn’t hold my baby until the urge passed because I swore he would smell it on my skin, taste it in my milk, and somehow it would sour him on life.

One of the patches before son’s first birthday. One.

Then one day when I couldn’t steady myself I broke down crying inconsolably. My mother was putting the baby down and came back to find me. Still whimpering, she ran a bath and put me in it.

I couldn’t remember the last time I felt like myself or didn’t feel myself disappearing.

Here’s what I know: in a country so driven by individualism I have been white-knuckling it through postpartum the way I had powered through everything else in my life. That approach was failing me this time. I didn’t start genuinely healing until I chose to surrender and let my native, collectivist culture take care of me.

I had nothing to prove to them. They had already seen me create and deliver a soul into the world. I had assumed they would think me weak for crumbling in postpartum. But just because they hadn’t prepared me for it didn’t mean they weren’t going to hold and heal me through it. I heard no judgment. Only offers to help in whatever way I needed. Even when I couldn’t articulate what I needed.

I know how fortunate I am. In a world where too many women don’t get anywhere near that level of support, my village saved my life.

For nearly three years it has taken me to clear the densest parts of the fog. I have largely survived without medication beyond a sleep aid. That’s not for lack of evaluations or prescriptions. At the suggestion of my therapist, I met with a psychiatrist for the first time – at my lowest point. About halfway through my first consult, I was prescribed four different medications. I’ve never been great about pills – even vitamins – so I wasn’t thrilled. But more than that, the answers to three questions made the decision for me.

I asked how long it would take to feel the effects. What the side effects would be. And how long after I started feeling better I could begin weaning off.

The one answer to a specific drug was all I needed to hear: once started, I could not stop taking it. Stopping would risk S-ideation which I had never had and did not want to be anywhere near the possibility of having. I am my son’s only parent. I could never do that to him.

Something is shifting.

I can feel it in the way mothers are showing up for Lindsay Clancy. It is not to justify the horror of what happened, but to bear witness to the fourth life lost that night. To say: I experienced my own fog and I made it out but we have to stop pretending it is not a harrowing act.

Motherhood has always required a village. American individualism has spent decades telling women they don’t need one. Or worse, that needing one makes us weak, that struggling needs to be quiet or medicated. The woman who like me are starting to speak up are choosing to hold space for one another and this is a moment.

But there’s a layer of this conversation that can’t be left out.

In this country, there is a tendency to collapse all conversations into binary dynamics – often along racial lines of Black and white experiences. But there is a universe of people in the middle. Brown women. Women in immigrant families. Women who grew up with La Llorona as folklore and a warning. Throughout history, women’s issues that could rally us – like those bodily autonomy and voting rights – had distinct markers of racial divide that hindered a fully integrated sense of solidarity.

But this moment feels different. I have watched women from many backgrounds begin to break their silence about postpartum to say out loud what they were never supposed to admit. I hope we can sustain this momentum well beyond whatever the verdict in the case because there are mothers in parallel universes who need this solidarity.

I recently learned about Latarsha Sanders – a Black mother suffering from mental illness who was recently granted a new trial after being convicted of the deaths of her two children. If this moment is real and something is genuinely shifting, then it should also include Latarsha Sanders. It has to include Brown mothers and immigrant mothers. The experiences of all mothers who have been dismissed as crazy for fighting their way out of the fog or just surviving it.

If we can finally move the needle in some way on maternal mental health and resource moms for recovery then maybe we will unlock something truly needed: maternal wellbeing. Because if there’s one factor that trumps all others in early childhood it’s a mother’s wellness. And at time when all odds are against moms – from family planning decisions to the crushing costs of childcare – this would be game changing.

No matter where this all leads us, let’s acknowledge that moms are tired enough to be mad and we’re talking about it – to each other and out loud. Something is shifting so let’s keep our foot on the gas.

Perinatal mental health conditions are highly treatable. If you or someone you know is struggling, here are resources shared by The Motherhood Center – a maternal health center specialized in treating Perinatal Mood & Anxiety Disorders:

The National Maternal Mental Health Hotline: 1-833-TLC-MAMA or 1-833-852-6262

Postpartum International: Help finding a therapist who specializes in perinatal mental health – postpartum.net

988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: Call or text 988

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In the early postpartum days, I was in a parenting course my therapist organized for me and another parent. She had been seeing me through my pregnancy and had another patient who was also single and expecting her child around the same time. She brought us together for weekly prenatal sessions and since I’d never done group therapy, I was open to it. There was something quietly hopeful about having another expectant mom to move through all the changes with and just vent if my hormones were insane on any given week.

Let’s call my therapist S.

She’s a petite, south Asian woman with the heart of a tiger. Also a daughter of immigrants, she is committed to a trauma-informed approach that names our triggers, teaches us to build healthy boundaries, and doesn’t let resilience overtake who we are. More than a therapist, she was an important life companion when I didn’t realize how much I would need one. I’ve written about how glorious I felt during pregnancy and I attribute much of that to the work S and I did together.

After my son arrived, S shifted our little group into a postpartum program facilitated by another therapist while she resumed our one-on-one sessions. Our new therapist, let’s call her J, taught me more about how to position myself as a parent than anyone or any book or mom blogger with a house-full of kids could. She and the world-famous Ms. Rachel have shaped how I think about creating space for little humans and supporting their nervous systems while minding my own regulation.

Something J specifically said has stayed close with me throughout these early years and been what I cling to when I feel myself sinking. She told me that research shows that parents, on average, “get it right” about 30% of the time.

I couldn’t believe it. How was that possible when I couldn’t pinpoint a single moment in my entire upbringing where an adult admitted being wrong, or anything less than right? Who knew grown ups are so unapologetic about gaslighting kids?

If I had a dollar for every time I’ve gone back to that 30% stat in the middle of the night or while making a big decision over these nearly three years, I’d have a college tuition banked.

When I first heard it, I let out an audible gasp. It was so hard not to feel like I was failing regularly and at everything. I had a baby I couldn’t properly hold or latch because of an unplanned delivery and a delayed milk supply which led to a painful onboarding to breastfeeding. I could barely get out of bed or off the toilet without support those first weeks which had me feeling physically broken. I couldn’t do the things that would make him coo or smile in the way he responded to close family and it made me a little jealous. For most of the time I was in the postpartum fog, I had the audacity to wonder if I had fumbled the bond entirely. And because the worry felt like judgement, I felt unworthy of the right to complain about the exhaustion, disorientation, guilt, shame, and even fear I was living in. If it weren’t for my insistence on skin to skin at all waking hours, I thought we might not connect at all. Insane to think that was even a real thought after making and carrying his whole body inside my body - but it was.

And then the losses. Rico at six weeks postpartum. Chico at six months. A spirit of grief rushed in before I could put on my armor or close the door or even just brace myself. I had never lived with a partner or had a child before them. I built my home with them. Planned my life including them in every decision. Losing them just as the greatest joy found its place in my heart, home, and extended family was cruel and unfair. And I didn’t feel it safe to mourn them the way I needed to. I had to keep the pain largely to myself because of how the grief would affect my mothering while breastfeeding. My best friends and close family gave me comfort while bursting with excitement for the new life. They delivered flowers and sent condolences as they would if I was mourning my children – because I was. When visits started, they made sure to acknowledge the losses before holding the baby and with some of them, I could hand off and have a good cry. The scale of emotions has been heavily skewed towards happiness but grief has always been in the background in these early years.

At some point, I surrendered to letting my village care for me and the baby in equal parts. We were literally two babies in this house.

As the months passed I fell deeper into the fog. It was like the “nothing” in the Neverending Story, and the more I felt like I was screaming into a void, the less sound came out of my mouth.

It was difficult to get out of bed. To recognize myself in the mirror. To feel more than numb. And as a well-trained expert on getting it together and doing what needs to be done, I went through most of the motions without a word. How could I with a caring village around me and this precious, healthy, little boy?

But I knew things were off.

My body shape-shifted, I went through multiple rounds of alopecia, my melasma faded somewhat but never fully went away. I had planned to be on leave from work until the new year but I was in literal shambles by that time so I drained my savings and emergency funds and some investments to take his first full year off. I don’t regret it. But I don’t feel entirely settled about it either given that I had to watch the entire sector my business was built on eviscerated in the first six months of 2024 and there was nothing I could do about it.

To quote all the moms who I know have said it before me: Postpartum is a b*tch.

I know that I’m stronger because of what I’ve been through so far, but as I slow-walk it through my last week with a two-year-old, I don’t know if I want to cry more than I want to cheer.

The fog has lifted substantially and, while life continues to be wild, I feel grounded and have more clarity about who I am, what I’m capable of, and the life I want to build with my son. In the aftermath of back-to-back work re-orgs within two years (one resulting in a layoff), insane financial stress, family illnesses, and the demands of a society without consideration for mothers and children, I’m back on my feet.

I just hope I’m not too late. That our bond is secure and his sense of safety – and my ability to provide it – is strong. This is fundamentally the goal of the zero to three era. Not any size or skill milestone, it’s this too often overlooked result of connection. I speak from my own experience that it predetermines everything else.

I recently read that age three is when lasting memories form. In other words, these first years belong entirely to a child’s parents and their people.

I’ve been sitting with that and I have mixed feelings.

On one hand, I love that my son won’t hold certain things against me because he won’t actually remember how they happened. I feel a tremendous relief from self-judgement for things I thought, felt, or even did when I wasn’t in my full capacity. Parenthood, and especially early motherhood, is an exercise in trial and error and it can completely crush any sense of confidence so it’s good to know that this darling little person isn’t taking notes or saving receipts of my bad calls, bloopers, bald spots, or complete meltdowns. All of those are mine, and mine alone, to process and release in due time.

On the other hand, he won’t remember some of the tender things I am going to hold onto forever. The wonder and the discovery. The delirium and the sound of his little person voice that I’ll play back for him someday. He will see those videos and photos and not recognize himself in them while they will be everything for me.

There’s something sacred about being the sole keeper of those years.

And something that breaks my heart a little because in parenting we have to say goodbye to our babies day by day and that too feels unfair and worthy of grief.

I have found that time is the hardest part of parenting nobody can prepare you for.

You can’t fully internalize the concept of time while you’re in the postpartum fog so when you finally make it out, you realize you’re behind the race against it.

There’s no book or course or expert or method or product that can give you any of it back. It is a great equalizer in that every parent of every child will have their turn to dance with it and never fully catch the beat.

Time just moves at a different pace when you’re a parent and, depending on your circumstances, it can and will overrun you on a regular basis. Biology slows you down. It blurs months you wish had been crisp and clear. The workday consumes hours you can’t get back and surrenders them to people who don’t even know your baby but get more than they do.

One minute your child is a tiny ball scrunched up on your chest and the next they’re running away from you asking you to chase them and speaking in full sentences in two languages.

I have been a working solo mama since he was a year old. I have been employment insecure and employed and in between. I have been healing and struggling and rebuilding. And through all of it he has been growing quietly, steadily, on his own timeline with and without me.

The memories of his first years are mine to keep and play back for him in the moments when he needs to be reminded of how far he has travelled, of the impression he has made on others, and of just how magical he truly is.

As for me, I’m finding that writing is soothing the lingering aches of motherhood. It helps me to make sense of this experience in a space where I can untangle all of the feelings, moments, victories, and failures.

In The MOTHERhood is not a highlight reel. It’s field notes from the feral first three years — processed on my own time, in my own words, for him and for anyone else who recognizes themselves in any of it.

Numa will turn three before the sun sets on July.

I’m holding so much hope for what comes next. For the memories we’ll make together and that he’ll carry as his own. For the stories he’ll tell someday about his childhood.

I hope it includes Sunday dancing in the living room. The words and nicknames in our made-up language. How he learned to be a Good Neighbor. The way I always asked people to beep as they drove off so he could wave from the front door.

I hope he remembers me with pride.

But mostly, I hope he comes to understand someday that he was fully loved through all kinds of imperfect, ordinary, and extraordinary moments during his first three years. As someone who had a baby in midlife I’m praying I have the time (and my faculties) to ground him in that before the Creator calls me home. Adding to the list of things I read somewhere, research shows that women who have kids in their 40s are more likely to live well into their 90s, so I just might have a shot.

As for the things missed, the hard things, the things swallowed by the nothing — those are mine to reconcile.

For now, I’m going to light three candles of my own this month because it’s my BIRTHday anniversary.

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This was the list, more or less. The order in which I was instructed to live according to my mother. A few instructions were implied alongside it — respect your elders, don’t get distracted by boys, don’t do anything that people, including family, could use to criticize me or her. Any deviation from those instructions, I knew, would land me at one end of a chancleta, a belt, or the very large and strong palm of my mother’s hand. But as I’ve come to learn (and heal) it mostly earned me a lifelong tussle with anxiety riddled by fear, guilt, and shame.

For better or for worse, I never found myself in much trouble at all. As the youngest child, I watched my older siblings fumble through their missteps and that was sufficient deterrent for me not to step out of line.

Growing up, the list always seemed less difficult than anything my mom had been through in her own childhood or what I watched her struggle through in mine. I’d venture a guess that none of that feels foreign to first-gen daughters of immigrants from Latin America — particularly those of us whose families come from humble circumstances. We are assigned to parents who faced hardships we could only imagine as apocalyptic from the stories they raised us on. They immigrated to a foreign country with no language, contacts, or safety, endured unspeakable things, and somehow had kids and found pockets of joy. In my case, I met many of the characters in my mother’s origin family in real life and been to the places she walked as a girl and young woman so I have as full of a picture as I’ll ever get and know where I get certain dogmas from as well as my cultural core.

My siblings and I were raised partly with the old traditions of our family and the newer realities of this country. English was not spoken at home except between my siblings and me. I didn’t even learn English until I went to school. And yet I was the one appointed to translate for extended family at doctor’s offices, Social Security, immigration, supermarkets, schools, and everywhere in between.

I followed most of the path laid out for me. I studied hard — not just because I had to but because I liked it and I was good at it. As the youngest in a large family, it was hard to find the thing that made me feel special besides people-pleasing, which is indoctrinated as a rite of passage for girls in much of Latino culture. So I got the grades. I didn’t let boys pull me off script. I built a career across civil rights, political campaigns, corporate advisory, and eventually started my own firm. A picture of diligence, most of the time.

I was all-work, with random intervals of globe-trotting while living at home until I was 39. In a nutshell: my level of family responsibility was outsized so instead of buying my own place I took on the family house and lived there with a rotation of relatives over the years.

For most of my adult life, my version of the list felt like evidence of something I couldn’t quite name. In my family, in my culture, there was a clear picture of what a woman’s life was supposed to look like by a certain age and it wasn’t my reality. I had degrees, a career, independence — but something felt off.

I didn’t yet understand that the list wasn’t actually for me. It was survival logic, inherited from a generation that needed predictability and stability more than anything else. Study hard so you have options. Marry so you’re not alone. Have children so you’re not alone. Take care of your parents because you owe them and so they’re not alone.

I was hard wired for work and did it across civil rights, politics, advisory, corporate, entrepreneurship but it took me a long time to learn work does not equal safety.

Then at 38, my dad passed away and something came loose in me. I felt untethered in a way I had not anticipated. Me – the child who anticipates and plans and worries about everything so I never feel like I’m not anchored or able to anchor others. I was out here between grief and trying to find some direction.

It was the Friday of Labor Day weekend. I had just wrapped up a call with my boss about returning to work after nearly a month out of office following a health scare and in hopes of heading off what would lead to eventual burnout. Who was I kidding? I was literally doing breathwork before that call and conjuring my most normal-sounding voice to assure him I was ready. I needed to be back the way you need to brush your teeth. Work was an essential part of my daily routine and my wellness – or so I’d convinced myself. So much so that I never realized it had become harmful until I crashed. But with a family depending on me as the primary breadwinner I couldn’t afford more time off. Instead, I told them I was ready and signed off with an “I’ll see you bright and early on Tuesday.”

My brother had been trying to reach me while I was on that call. He dialed me multiple times and I knew it was urgent. I called as soon as I could and heard about our father’s passing.

News like that — even when you know it’s coming — overwhelms you in an instant. All I could do was sit down and hold myself. My parent’s divorce was official when I was very young and to say their relationship was strained would be the understatement of the year. The point is we didn’t have a close relationship but not for love lost between the two of us. It was more of an issue of neither of us trying harder. My Latino dad was the image of machismo and I now know that it was how he was shaped and sadly, he was simply not capable to overcome it in his life. It cost him proximity to his kids and, unfortunately, we were the ones left to reconcile that.

The coming days were a blur that ended with my dad’s burial in Santiago, Dominican Republic. There was something about leaving him there that felt like a soft push from behind. I watched the clouds clear as my sister and I sat on the tarmac waiting for takeoff and had that sensation of wanting to do something new. Different. For me.

I got home and told my best friend — a real estate agent — that I needed to move. I wasn’t ready to go all out and move somewhere new entirely but I needed out of my family home. I hadn’t fully realized until then that I wasn’t yet living my life for me. It took a perfect storm to realize it.

By the end of that year, I bought the most run-down home in the county, exactly one traffic light away from my family’s house. Far enough to stand on my own. Close enough to answer any urgent call.

At 39, I settled into my new home with Chico — my soul dog — and Rico, my freshly adopted bonus dog. I left my job and started slowly healing while building a purpose-driven consulting firm. I was learning, for the first time, what it meant to put myself first. And in spite of those steps being out of alignment with what was expected of me, things were moving.

The pandemic hit shortly after and the boys and I lived happily in our little jungle of a home. I even started writing a book — a memoir. It’s been a childhood dream that finally had some room to breathe. But every now and then a thought would arrive: was a baby still in the cards for me? It was on the list. It had also always been on my heart.

The double shifts of building a business and writing a book caught up with me eventually. Old friends came to visit again — insomnia, alopecia — except this time during a pandemic, which had a way of feeling ten times worse. I got a lot of help from trauma-informed healers who guided me through that season, and Chico and Rico never left my side.

I read dozens of books on writing and intergenerational trauma. I settled family scores with my mom — the kind of settling that doesn’t happen in one conversation but over months of returning to the same hard truths until they stopped being so hard. I started sleeping again. My hair started growing back.

By the end of 2022 I had a book proposal, a business, and a positive pregnancy test.

All three. At once. Completely out of any sequence anyone would have advised and definitely outside of the respectability boundaries I’d learned as a girl.

At 45, I welcomed my son on my own — by choice and by circumstance in roughly equal measure. Later than most women but right on time for me.

Motherhood eviscerated the list and the rules for me. It has rewired my entire life. I often say that Matrescence is the most disorienting, exhausting, chaotic, and magnificent experience at the same time – though not on the same day.

I’ve moved into a new space, a new community, a new version of me. I could beat myself up for the race against time I often feel I’ve lost, but I’d rather give myself grace for who I’ve been in the fog of early motherhood when I haven’t been in my fullest power and awareness. I know this is exactly where I was meant to begin the next stage of my life. And with each day, I’m normalizing the recalibration and reinvention that I have a chance to experience.

Today, at 48, I’m reimagining my life. After 20+ years of a career, I’m employment insecure and choosing not to scramble back into the next version of stability but instead chase my next dream. I’ve been the activist, the advisor, the corporate leader, but none of those paths is really and truly calling me. That dream of being a published author wasn’t a phase. I have journals, a book proposal, and a Substack at my back so there’s a foundation for something new. That dream survived burnout, grief, generational trauma, and a pandemic to get here. What if it was just waiting for the last couple of chapters to be experienced so I round out the tale?

My dreams exist independently and in concert with being Numa’s mother and I want to model a full life for him. One that reflects ambition, creativity, and the courage to keep becoming so that the only list he adheres to is the one he drafts when the time comes. And that when he is ready, he knows that I will not only cheer him on but I will have the wisdom to guide and support him.

As for the remaining items on my original list, taking care of my mom while raising my son keeps me in the sandwich generation but I wouldn’t have it any other way. She has been my keeper for the whole of my life and I consider it an honor to keep the rest of hers.

Marriage? Maybe someday. You never know.

In motherhood, career, and life in general - I’ve managed without a set roadmap and a timing all my own so I’m embracing the rest of this journey with an open heart.

For now, I’m just working on getting my introverted, highly private, perfectionist self to spend 40 days talking straight to camera about the unfiltered, unglamorous, occasionally embarrassing truth of what this season of life actually feels like.

This is what success redefined looks like for me. Risks taken. Lessons learned. A life recalibrated for the better.

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Suddenly a man popped up at my aunt’s back door that led out from the kitchen. He held onto the bars of the locked screen door and asked for my aunt. He looked run down — maybe even drunk. A faded t-shirt and long jean cutoffs with a pair of shoes that were on their last leg. His skin was a beautiful bronze and his hair was that brown-blonde mix of a beach bum. But the dirty fingernails and paranoid mannerisms of looking around gave the vibe of someone looking for a meal. He made me a bit uncomfortable but I entertained his many questions over a few minutes. The chatter took a quick turn.

Cuántos años tienes? How old are you? He asked.

Treinta y Tres. Thirty-three, I replied.

¡La Edad de Cristo! The age of Christ, he gasped. Be careful. This will be a difficult year for you. Take care of yourself. And he was gone as fast as he appeared.

The moment gave me a chill and the exchange has lingered with me to this day.

When I told my aunt someone had come looking for her and described him, she told me not to worry — that he’s a poor soul she looks after when she can.

A couple of months after this trip, my life was in literal shambles in the aftermath of a failed situationship. My mother asked me to drive her to pick up I agreed and drove her through Washington DC. The ride was generally quiet on the way up but something happened on the way down and it shifted our relationship and my understanding of our family’s immigrant story.

My mother had first arrived in Washington DC as a teenager and we’ve lived in or just outside the city our whole lives together. But after nearly 40 years in this country no one besides my mom knew the price paid for our citizenship. That story she held as close as any secret.

My mom was born in a small village in Carazo, Nicaragua. She arrived in the United States shortly after her nineteenth birthday, brought over by a diplomatic family my grandmother believed would change her life forever.

They did.

She arrived documented. A domestic worker which we should all know to be code for something else when it pertains to young women from the global majority. She soon became undocumented and vulnerable at a time when the city was literally on fire at the height of the civil rights movement. Eventually, she became resident and then, nearly twenty years and three U.S.-born children after first setting foot in this country, an American citizen.

Our immigrant story is part of a book I’ve been writing for some time so I’ll reserve the details for that work but I can share that in the years between arrival and citizenship, my mother endured the unspeakable. A girl. A servant. She didn’t speak the language, had no money or firm ground under her feet. But she survived the way women in my family have always survived. More than that, she built an entire family foundation on foreign land and has long stood as the bridge between two countries and multiple generations.

My mother’s immigrant experience is part of a tapestry of endless stories of immigrant women. For me, the story is the very reason I was born a full-bodied U.S. citizen. That girl who arrived at nineteen with nothing paid forward my citizenship with her humanity and endurance.

The inheritance of citizenship as the child of immigrants is what I think about when people debate who deserves to be an American.

Just days before the country celebrates a historic milestone, the Supreme Court ruled to uphold birthright citizenship. Because in 2026, a president of the United States was openly calling into question the right of children born here to citizenship.

It was a ruling, not a gift. The Fourteenth Amendment has been the law of this land since 1868 — passed in the aftermath of slavery to ensure that people born on American soil could not be stripped of their citizenship based on who their parents were or where their parents came from. The court reaffirmed something that was already there, at a moment when so much of what was already there is being questioned, dismantled, or quietly buried.

I take no small comfort in this reaffirmation. Not because I needed the court to tell me people like me belong here. But because this country has a habit of needing to be reminded of its own promises.

Let me say something plainly on the 250th birthday of the United States of America.

All non-native peoples in this country are immigrants on land that was taken from its stewards and reimagined by settlers who forced labor under the most inhumane circumstances in history. That legacy has mutated but not disappeared. And the debate about who belongs here is alive and well. It is grounded in colonialism and the machinery it constructed to govern this country and the modern world. But somewhere along the line it stopped tracking with reality and demographics that will turn it on its head sooner or later.

Families like mine are here because colonial forces came to our countries of origin first and in many cases more than once. Nicaragua and my father’s (QEPD) Dominican Republic have lived to tell the stories. Throughout my life, my closest friends have been children of immigrants with whom I’ve found a sisterhood based on the resonance of our collectivist cultures and experiences. Our people didn’t arrive here looking for charity. They came in pursuit of that promise of work, stability, and opportunity to build and raise families in safety.

It’s insane and infuriating that we are still having the same debate when each and every corner of this country has been reinforced by immigrants. But here we are. Still asking brown and Black people to justify our presence. Nothing will ever gaslight me more than this.

So while the country gathers for barbecues and fireworks and everything Americana, let me sit in the home I built in the country I claim to belong to and watch the countless children of immigrants from countries around the world competing in the beautiful game. This is how my son, my mother, and I will celebrate. Three generations of Americans holding the promise of a country between us and refusing to let it go.

More importantly for me, we will refuse to put on a party dress until freedom and dignity are the values we all agree remain fundamentally what everyone here is owed. Everyone.

No doubt we’ll hear the fireworks from the National Mall and the last of the flyovers as I get my son ready for bed.

Happy Independence Day America.

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Most of my life, I’ve lived between worlds — between cultures, expectations, realities, and resources, careers, you name it — so I’m no stranger to operating in the wild and making the most of things. If you’ve ever been the first in your family to do anything — especially as a daughter of immigrants — you can probably relate.

Even with all of that, and a physically active lifestyle, nothing prepared me postpartum in my mid-late forties. Forget what you heard or might think: there is a significant difference in having a baby at this stage of life. And while motherhood is literally different for every mother-child pairing, the greatest place I’ve noticed the difference is in recovery. This has nothing to do with losing baby weight but everything to do with having the physical, mental, and emotional strength to be as resilient in our 40s as we were or could have been in our 20s and 30s. Of course there are exceptions as with anything, but I have found resonance with the few over-40 moms I’ve spoken to on this topic.

Having a baby was not only a miracle and my greatest manifestation in life, but it is completely transforming me as a person from the inside out. A few months ago, I wrote a couple of posts about the mind-body confusion and disconnect I’ve experienced postpartum and left off with an appointment scheduled to see a pelvic floor therapist.

I’m back to say that since April not only have my brain and pelvic floor gotten reacquainted, they’ve gotten stronger and I have to believe it was the spark I needed to get my senses realigned.

At a recent session, my therapist told me something I wasn’t fully expecting to hear – she told me I’m strong. It was mostly related to the areas we’ve worked on but I’m taking it as a blanket statement of affirmation. I now have the knowledge to keep building strength on my own, especially as I prepare for whatever comes next in feminine health and aging.

I’m graduating, and who doesn’t love a milestone like that?

Started from the bottom now we’re here

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I hadn’t realized how disconnected I’d become from my own body until I was asked to simply find a muscle and squeeze it. Side note — all women (and people) should know how to connect with their pelvic floor as a life skill.

I couldn’t. Not in any way I could feel or trust. The signal just wasn’t getting through. All I knew was it felt like my guts might fall out if I didn’t tighten or lift something up without some sort of compression clothing. My midsection felt like mush. Months of work went into rebuilding that connection between my brain and my muscles. Small, controlled exercises. Patient physical therapists who understood that my body and I were getting reacquainted after pregnancy, a C-section, and however many years of simply not paying attention.

It felt strange in the beginning. Embarrassing, if I’m honest — to need this much help finding a part of myself that used to just work without my noticing.

But somewhere in those months, the connection clicked. I learned how to find it. How to feel it. How to actually use it.

People forget that a lot of postpartum people still look pregnant for a while

Here’s the part that doesn’t get talked about nearly enough: the pelvic floor isn’t just a postpartum issue. It’s an aging issue too, and it’s coming for all of us whether we’ve had children or not.

As estrogen declines through perimenopause and menopause, the connective tissue throughout the body — including the pelvic floor — loses elasticity and strength right along with everything else. That’s part of why incontinence, prolapse, and pelvic pain become so much more common for women in their forties, fifties, and beyond. It’s rarely discussed in the same breath as hot flashes and mood swings, but it’s just as real and just as disruptive to daily life. Nobody hands you a pamphlet about this one at your annual physical and I know too many women who are having partial or complete hysterectomies in midlife.

My therapists were direct about it: I’m in a window right now where muscle mass is fighting for its life. Whatever strength I build and hold onto today is strength I carry through the decades ahead. This wasn’t just about today’s comfort. It was about building a foundation before I needed it most.

I no longer feel like I’m going to pee my pants if I sneeze hard.

I know that sentence might make you laugh, or wince, or nod because you know exactly what I’m talking about. But it’s the most honest measure of progress I have. My core feels less open than it did. My hips and lower back don’t carry the soreness they used to, even after long hours at a desk job that gives my body nothing but bad posture and stillness. My posture itself feels better, in spite of everything working against it.

I feel secure in my body in a way I hadn’t felt since before pregnancy. Maybe longer than that, honestly. And with this level of confidence, I am genuinely looking forward to getting some actual abs back too.

Here’s something else nobody told me: postpartum is not a season. It’s a continuum. And for some of us, it takes years — not weeks, not months — before we feel anything close to ourselves again. In my family there are plenty of women with thoughts, experiences, and endless judgment on sexuality, pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood, but somewhere along the line they learned to keep their mouths shut about the more vulnerable aspects of that quiet calibration of returning to self. As with many other things as a first in my family, I’ve had to navigate this with no manual too.

My son is almost three. And I finally feel myself coming back online.

I want to say that plainly because the cultural script around postpartum recovery is so dishonest. Six weeks to get an all-clear at a doctor’s visit that lasts all of 15 minutes implies you’re done healing. The truth, for many of us, is a slow and uneven recalibration that unfolds over years — physically, hormonally, neurologically, and in every layer of identity underneath all of that.

There’s real science behind why this takes so long. Researchers studying the maternal brain have found that a woman’s brain undergoes measurable structural changes during pregnancy and early motherhood — changes in gray matter that persist for years afterward, not days or weeks. Some have compared it to the scale of remodeling that happens during adolescence. We don’t expect a teenager to “bounce back” into who they were before puberty in six weeks, or ever. I’m not sure why we expect it of new mothers.

Matrescence — the becoming of a mother — is a full-scale transformation. And it’s not a failure to experience it slowly. It took me — a type A, head-down, hard-charging, problem-solving woman — letting go of trying to control the pace to actually listen to what my body needed.

Nobody likes to be in the group taking longer to do anything successfully — especially not in our society. But here I am, still recovering and now facing an entirely new set of thoughts and questions.

How do I get back into a zone? What does that even mean now?

What does that even look like at this stage of my life, in this body, with this child, after everything that’s happened in between?

What I’m realizing is that this isn’t only a physical recovery anymore. It’s a shift from getting back on my feet to actually building strength back.

I was knocked down. I have been functioning on my heels for a long time — physically, professionally, emotionally, all of it. But I’ve got my footing now and I’m ready for some forward momentum in my body. I’m now focused on resolving how I think about my personal and professional lives fitting together instead of fighting each other for scraps of my attention.

I’ve heard people describe parts of this stage as a millennial career crisis. Others call it on the whole a midlife reinvention. I resonate with both and belong fully to neither. I’m Xennial — caught in that strange generational sliver between Gen X and Millennial — and I came to motherhood at a time when most of my peers are either deep into parenting older kids or already easing into perimenopause themselves. I’m not in crisis. I’m not in a traditional midlife either. I’m something else entirely, recalibrating on my own timeline the way I seem to do everything.

After more than 20 years of work across civil rights, political campaigns, corporate advisory, and my own consulting venture, I am genuinely unsure what’s next professionally. I’ve been calling it employment insecurity, and I’m not interested in dressing it up as anything prettier than that.

But I do know one thing clearly, even in the uncertainty: my dream is connected to storytelling. To writing. It’s what my gut keeps telling me, persistently, regardless of what my head tries to talk me into instead.

If postpartum has drilled anything into me, it’s that I have spent my whole life trusting my head. That strategic, analytical, always three steps ahead approach served its purpose. The experience forced me to start trusting my gut instead, because my head doesn’t have all the answers. But my gut speaks from intuition, and I feel more connected to that than ever before.

After everything this body has carried — decades of survival, pregnancy, an unexpected C-section, postpartum, the long unglamorous on-ramp of matrescence, it’s ready for the next stretch. It’s taken small, controlled, consistent movement to reconnect organs, muscle, and confidence.

Turns out that’s also exactly what was needed to rebuild everything else.

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It was a quarter to nine in the morning when I walked into the hospital lobby and there they were — my big brother and sister, holding down the fort as our mom underwent a pretty serious surgery.

My brother had arrived extra early — even before my sister got there with my mom. He’s been an outlier in the family and kept a safe and noticeable distance in adulthood. It stems from a lot of pain and not to give him a pass, but I understand why he rarely shows up at all. Until a few years ago we always had a strong relationship. While there are six years between us, we understand each other and tend to accept our respective gifts and faults without judgment. If I’m honest, he’s probably the only close relative who doesn’t talk shit about me and my quirks at any given point. He’s not usually the expressive type but he has on more than one occasion told me he admires and respects me. More importantly, he usually shows up for me. That hasn’t always been the case for my mom. They’ve had a challenging relationship over the years but I’m hopeful it’s entering a new era. After his own health scare a little over a year ago, their dynamic changed and I want to believe it’s doing some sort of healing between and for them. She was at his bedside in some pretty scary moments and maybe, just maybe, he finally saw her wanting and actually being able to show up for him in ways he’d always wanted to have her.

What’s important is that he took a personal day off from a job he recently started and stood watch from about 6am to 6pm.

As we sat in the lobby wondering how my mom was doing, what the results would be, and how we’d need to hold the line on a consistent message about the lifestyle changes she’d need to adopt — I couldn’t help but see our child versions of ourselves. Each one playing the role I always remembered. My sister taking the lead, being the mom of the moment. Directing. Strict. My brother, somewhat aloof but there in solidarity for when someone was needed to step in. And me, waiting to diligently take instructions.

(For my zodiac types: I’m a Capricorn, my brother’s a Sagittarius which explains the healthy nature of friendship between us. My sister’s a Leo with that commanding presence of the leader of the pack, even when she has her own cowardly lion moments. Make of that what you will.)

All of us playing the exact roles my mom taught us to play as children.

My sister had to leave for a few hours of work so it was just me and my brother for a while. Before taking a cat nap, he went out to get us some breakfast with an offer for another coffee since he was sure I’d already had a cup because I’m not known to talk to people without one in the morning.

In the weeks prior to the surgery, my mom and I had several conversations that were so revealing. At some point in my late twenties/early thirties our dynamic went beyond mother-youngest daughter vibes to one that allowed for a lot of confiding and trusting in one another on a different level. We bought a home together. We budgeted family needs together. We supported extended family abroad together. I was in so deep in family obligations that it delayed an independence I only came to find on the cusp of my forties when I built my own home nearby. Say nothing to me about that.

During that shift I focused on going inward and embarked on a healing journey that inevitably started with her. While she raised us with an iron fist, I never fully saw her against the backdrop of everything she was facing. How could I, when my mom has been a chamber of secrets — always putting up a façade of being fine. But how can you actually be fine after arriving in this country as a teen indentured servant, after surviving not one but two relationships plagued by domestic violence, after having to be the human bridge between this country and family living in a war-torn one, and on top of it all having to raise three children mostly on your own?

She has survived it all and has the secrets to show for it. During my healing journey we worked through a lot of what had been hidden between us and I felt like I got to know my mother as a woman in a way I wish all daughters could know their own. But the biggest secret she has protected is herself. Her feelings and her mental and physical load.

When I had my son, my mother became an invaluable support. I’m grateful to have a village but my mom has stood in gaps that have kept me from spiraling. Beyond holding me through my cuarentena and practically moving in for my first few months of motherhood, she showed up in all the ways some can say a partner does. She reminded me of my own strength in moments when not having a partner could have done some serious damage in early postpartum. She has played a critical role in helping me afford childcare at home and in giving my child a grandparent’s presence and love that my siblings and I never experienced ourselves.

She has made my load lighter.

I knew she was worried about the procedure. She has always muscled through pain — shoulder pain, hip pain, pain from falls, the pains of life. She’s never been one to get sick and is a total baby when she does. But the point is she has always found a way to get better. Her father came from a line of centenarians and passed of natural causes at nearly 100 himself. So she deems herself somewhat invincible. She would also say she’s in such close communication with God that He won’t call her home abruptly, and if He does, she’s ready. Surgery was the furthest thing from her mind, but there was no quick fix for the chronic pain she was experiencing. To respect her privacy I’ll only say that it required removing an organ, and she couldn’t fully accept there wasn’t an alternative.

She kept coming back to wanting to be buried with all of her organs intact as she came into the world. I couldn’t wholly understand how she didn’t change her mind even after a diagnosis. But I think I understand it better now.

Among the love language archetypes, my mother is an acts of service person through and through. That’s how she gives and wants to receive love. So much of her self-worth lives in what she can do for others. It’s who she is. It’s how she was raised. It’s who I’ve known her to be my whole life. It’s fair to say it’s also greatly influenced by her experience as an immigrant who has equated service with work with survival.

In this exact moment when she can’t do for others, she is restless and anxious. She doesn’t like being tended to. She doesn’t like being babied. She takes it all as a negative judgment on her — proof that she’s slipping, that she’s becoming less than she was. And it’s no secret she’s also too vain to enjoy aging. I think that’s the Scorpio in her.

Life on the other side of surgery is a big physical change for her but it is a bigger emotional and lifestyle change she is going to have to navigate. My only prayer is that once we get through the initial healing, she will experience a relief that will allow her to enjoy life a little more.

A word on the physicality of it all from someone who’s still navigating these waters. I miss my old body too. Everything that no longer lives in my current one — a baby, a placenta, strength, and a whole lot of brain cells. I have mourned these things in the depths of dark places I hope never to return to, and I’m grateful I haven’t had to keep those feelings inside. I’ve processed some through therapy. I’ve processed more through writing. But I also know the body keeps score, so I’m mindful that major changes - especially traumatic ones — have lifelong impact. I imagine some of that reality was influencing my mom’s hesitation. Or her fear.

At the end of each conversation about the upcoming surgery, I would close by saying that her body has worked miracles. It has carried her nearly 80 years through countless trials, tribulations, and the greatest victories of all — the delivery of three healthy babies who now all have children of their own. And one of those grandchildren even brought forth her great grandchild just a few weeks ago. It is time for that body to experience the softness, the care, and the health it deserves.

It usually left her crying. And I felt cold saying it all so matter-of-factly. With such little empathy for the doom she was feeling about the change in her body. But I didn’t mean it that way and I hope she could sense the concern and care intended.

I grew up in a collectivist culture and a collectivist family. We help where we can, with what we can. As the child who is nearest, who has had the most financial security, and who has been childless the longest, I assumed the role of the helper. Not the leader. The helper. I don’t say that expecting a trophy. I say it to add a layer of complexity to my current situation: caring for a toddler and an aging parent who has been generally healthy and has, until now, been the one in a mutually helpful relationship with me.

She supports care for my baby and my house. I support her in more financial ways, and now in caretaking her back to health. It’s reciprocal in a way that doesn’t always get named in conversations about the sandwich generation. We don’t just sacrifice in both directions. We exchange. We give what we have. We receive what we’re given.

My mom’s own siblings have stepped in too. A meal train. Good company. The collectivist instinct doesn’t stop at children helping parents. It runs sideways through siblings, cousins, whoever is closest and able. My sister took the lead on her care for the first week and a half while I was swamped with work, and she has become a vigilant authority my mother doesn’t dare argue with. That alone tells me my mom is healing — she’s staying put, following doctor’s orders, letting herself be managed in a way she would never have tolerated a month ago.

I’ve kept my son home with her this long in part because it has given my mom enormous purpose at a stage in life where our elders can so easily slip into despair from not feeling as resourced or physically capable as they once were. Watching Numa grow under her care hasn’t just kept the childcare problem from overtaking me. It has given her something to wake up for.

That changes the math of what this has cost me.

The day of her surgery I had to arrange extended childcare for the first time, and I’ll need to hold onto that arrangement for an undetermined amount of time. It also means I’m accelerating my search for an early childhood center for Numa. My original plan was to keep him home until kindergarten, the way I was raised, the way my siblings were raised, because full native Spanish fluency and cultural immersion has been my top priority and no matter what I have seen in formal programs, there is nothing like growing up inside your family’s cultural experience. That plan is shifting now, reshaped by an emergency that needs to be prioritized.

On any given day I’m checking in on Numa by text, FaceTime, or a Nanit camera. Having my mom in my house most of the day has given me enormous security for nearly three years. But now I have to equally prioritize her recovery — in her own home, free of hazards that could cause a fall or further injury, with ready access to whatever she needs until she’s well enough. I check in with her regularly too, though I haven’t set up cameras in her house. She would fire me as a daughter.

Financially, the heaviest thing I carry — aside from mortgages and regular old debt — is childcare. I have a love-hate relationship with it. I found an amazing caregiver who loves and cares for my son well. But at the end of the day I’m basically working to pay for someone else to have what I wish I could have: time with him.

There are other costs tied to helping my mom too. She was forced into retirement during the pandemic without a retirement plan — a common financial reality for working class immigrants who gave everything to this country and were given very little structure to retire safely into. So I help where I can. The way she taught me to.

There is such a gap between what a woman can know by feeling and intuition and the information we actually get from our doctors. I can’t tell you how much I’ve had to take on a second job of being my own medical advocate. From my mid-thirties when I became hypervigilant about my fertility, through an advanced-maternal-age pregnancy, through early postpartum, to where I am now, I’ve had to navigate a system not built for women or our many transformations. This is with two advanced degrees, a type A personality, a network of smart people and resources, and a general curiosity about my own wellness that keeps me searching for ways to survive. Not just for myself anymore. For my son, who will need me for many years to come. And increasingly, for my mother, who needs me now in ways she never let herself need anyone before.

I am learning what it means to hold both ends of this rope at once. The beginning of a life and the back half of another. A toddler who needs me to keep showing up so he can keep becoming. A mother who needs me to keep showing up so she can keep healing even as she resists every bit of the tending.

I don’t know how long this season lasts. I don’t think anyone in the sandwich knows that going in. I recognize how fortunate we've been. My mom has generally been a healthy woman. I know that changes. I know there will likely come a stage where this looks different — for her, and for us as her children and caretakers. I can't imagine it yet, and I won't try to today. Right now my only job is getting her through this current chapter.

The greatest truth in I’m sitting with is this: my mother has held me through every stage of my life even when I’ve struggled to hold myself. It’s what a lot of mothers do. We have the capacity to be a one-person village designed and equipped to meet the needs of each of our children. And for some of us, a parent.

Numa doesn’t fully understand that his grandmother (“Mami”) isn’t well. He just knows he gets to walk down to her house every day, and he hates leaving when it’s time to come home. He climbs up onto her recliner with her every chance he gets just to be close to her as the rest of us wince hoping he doesn’t cause her pain. They have a beautiful bond.

If I’m honest, I love the extra time the two of us have together right now too. I could do without the growth spurt that has his emotions and his sleep all over the place. But even that — even the chaos of it — feels like it’s circling back to something true about this season. Everyone I love most is changing shape at the same time.

What I’m really hoping for on the other side of this healing is something specific. I want to take my mom somewhere that isn’t home. She has always considered trips to Nicaragua her vacations and they have been, in their own way. But I’ve found something different in places where I’m truly just a visitor. Where I get to play tourist, or fake being a native somewhere. Spain. Italy. Antigua, Guatemala. They’ve been on her list for years.

Fingers crossed that a healed Mami also feels a little adventurous. She has a lot of life left in her and I’m looking forward to seeing her experience it to the fullest.

In the meantime I’ll be here sitting with the fact that the two people I’m caring for most right now are standing at opposite ends of a human experience. And somehow, I’m the bridge between them.

To my fellow sandwich gen people - KEEP GOING. We GOT this.

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Have you ever seen a human being born into the world?

Not on TV but right there in front of you. In real time.

If you have, you know what I’m talking about when I say it changes the way you see life and you can’t unsee it.

There is a specific moment. A breath. A tension. And an agonizing last push when the thin veil between life and a miracle seems to lift. I can’t put it into the right words but that’s how it’s seared in my memory.

I’ve seen it. And it’s so monumental that it hasn’t faded even after experiencing the birth of my own child.

I was in a delivery room nearly 30 years ago when my niece emerged after what seemed to be an endless labor difficult to witness. I remember so much about that night. The walking, the swaying, the laying, the turning, the groans, the beeps of the monitors. And then the window of intensity. The minutes that flashed like seconds as the medical team scurried around and the larger-than-life family OBGYN rushed into the room and saw the baby’s head crowning. The cold air in the room was prickly. Words were short and everyone seemed to brace during those final pushes. Then in a moment so unreal, two bodies that had conspired to build a lifelong bond broke apart. It was devastating and beautiful.

Just wow.

That night, my niece was born from my big sister — my second mother, my protector, my person.

My sister and I shared a bed until the day she got married, the summer after graduating from high school. It was a so hard for me. She had been with me my whole life. A traditionally raised eldest daughter in our immigrant family, she carried responsibilities that truncated her childhood. She was part sister, part parent, part shield. And then she was gone.

Before long she leaped into a new realm where I could not follow and our relationship inevitably changed for many years. As she joined the circle of mothers, I remained in that of the children. It would be well over two decades from the birth of my sister’s youngest daughter to the birth of my son. In other words, I spent such a long time in that children’s circle that I was on track to stay there forever. No degree, no career, no homeownership, no relationship ever got me out of that place.

My son had to come get me.

My sister has always been a mothering type. She mothered me. She mothered my brother. She mothered her daughters. She Godmothered a couple of kids. It was the part of the legacy she inherited from my mother and our grandmother.

She took that inheritance seriously. She raised her daughters with intention. She interrupted patterns where she could. She did the work — not always with the language or emotions for it, not always with the support she deserved, but she did it.

When we were kids, I was my sister’s first baby doll. I was a small child so she always made sure I was safe even before she was. She urged my mom to let me play sports and as I got older and adventured out in the world, she stood by my mom’s side while signaling me to run. She was there for every major milestone in my life making sure there was never a gap in my mothering. And there was nothing more profound in our relationship than seeing her child emerge until the night she stood over my shoulder caring for me in a delivery room before being the first family hands to hold my son. The first voice he heard call him by his name.

My sister is special and I’m forever grateful she is my sister-companion in this life.

Truth be told, our experiences couldn’t be more distinct. I inherited something different. As the youngest daughter, I have always been in constant motion towards the horizon. The girl on top of all the shoulders tasked with pushing towards the places no woman in our family has yet gone. And because I’m endlessly curious — always in a state of exploration and transformation. What else was there to do while waiting and wondering if I would ever be invited into the society of mothers? I don’t regret or resent my inheritance, I wear it with pride, but it took me a long time to understand why my path had a different trajectory. To understand my purpose in my family and why it was necessary for me to be mothered in some ways for much longer than everyone else.

When I learned my niece was having a girl, I cried for my sister.

Not from sadness. But happiness for what I believe it means.

While I was pregnant I came across a saying that when you have a son it symbolizes the end of a cycle of generational trauma, and when you have a daughter she is sent to help bring a resolution — or something like that. I learned I was having a boy as I was closing a chapter of deep inner work and healing so the notion that my son was coming felt like a bit of recognition and even redemption. And when I learned my niece was having a girl I felt a surge of energy like knowing that reinforcements were coming with a light that could refresh our feminine ranks.

This baby girl is a joy for all of us. A miracle for her parents. And a window opened for her grandmother. A chance to see the seed of the seed she planted blossom. To bask in the glory of seeing herself survive outside of her body twice over. And to relive childhood and parenthood in tandem — only this time softer. More flexible. More fun and indulgent. And in all the ways she deserved and was deprived of in her own childhood or motherhood.

The night my sister’s granddaughter was born, she was texting me real-time updates from the hospital.

When she told me the baby had arrived I knew exactly what to ask.

Tell me about the chin.

Because here is what you need to know about our family: my father — may God rest his soul — had a cleft chin. My sister is the spitting image of him and she inherited it. Both of her daughters inherited it. It is one of the most specific, visible, undeniable things our father left behind — written into the faces of the women who came from him.

Her reply came quickly.

She has the chin.

Even though my dad is no longer with us, he is still showing up. In my sister’s face. In her daughters’ faces. And now in the face of his great granddaughter. While they will not have a chance to meet Earthside, she will carry a part of him.

That is what legacy looks like. Not always the things we choose to pass down. Sometimes the things that travel on their own — written into the body, arriving without being asked.

I also want to be clear: I am not downplaying the important role of masculine energy in this experience. My nephew — in-law and love and real-life — did more than bear witness. He stood in the gap of fatherhood that looms in our story and set a new precedent. He may not see it in the fog of these early postpartum days but he was a pillar for three generations in their most vulnerable experience and I’m so proud of him.

Last weekend my sister saw life come into the world. She witnessed what I had witnessed so many years prior. She is a woman of deep faith but not the big feelings sister in this family — that role is otherwise occupied. But I would venture to say she is full of feels these days and I hope this new era brings out the best in her. I hope it brings her the softness she has always deserved and I hope it makes her the most fabulous abuela to have ever lived.

It’s her birthright.

As for me, you can now call me Great Tia. Or just Tia the Great.

Pull up. Mi casa es su casa. Welcome to the neighborhood. 🏡

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I know I’m not the only woman to do this mom thing later than most — but I’ll be the first to admit it’s made me a bit of an anti-social butterfly.

I don’t know if I’m just not fit for the whole process of making new friends or I’m just moodier than normal but, either way, I show up, I observe, I smile, and I go home from social occasions and don’t miss them.

A few weeks ago, I was in a Friday evening class at a local children’s gym with my son when a dad whose daughter had been eagerly trying to play with my son said — out of nowhere — “she’s been asking about Numa for weeks.”

Oh! I said, genuinely surprised. How sweet!

It started a small exchange with this probably-late-thirties dad holding a six-month-old while watching his toddler climb through rings at a station set up. Let’s call him Golf Dad. He’s tall with reddish-brown hair. Short-sleeved sports shirt. Workout pants. Titleist cap. A friendly smile that took months to earn — because for months before this we didn’t even make eye contact. That’s sort of normal in this setting because developmentally our kids are still cool with just playing with their caregivers. But still. Parents barely acknowledge each other. We literally keep eyes on our kids and the teacher offering an occasional closed mouth smile or – wait for it - a “have a nice weekend!” to another parent on the way out.

His wife used to come to class more often than him but after their second baby he’s mostly on point. Their daughters are little red-haired baby dolls in pink outfits every single week.

I can give you all of this detail about how they look because I’ve been quietly cataloguing the entire class for a year. And yet — ask me why I cannot hold a single conversation with a single parent when we literally have something in common. Same gym. Same time. Every Friday.

Have we ever set up play dates? No. Have they ever invited us to a birthday? No. For the first six months, my son was the youngest and the largest child in the class but this month there’s a new crop of babies as the older kids have graduated into the three-year-old cohort. So, it’s just Numa and the petite red head now leading the pack.

That day with Golf Dad, when I had no idea what to say, I said something like: “It’s crazy how the kids start remembering and asking about each other when they don’t fully play together yet. Not so different from us adults I guess!”

He smiled in that southern have-to-be-kind way.

And because I was nervous — for some reason — I took it a step further. I admitted: “I always tell my best friend we were gifted opposite kids because her son and I are the introverts and she and my son are the literal life of the party.”

What was I even trying to say? A few weeks later I still have no idea. Other than it was my way of trying to stir a laugh or anything that would give the awkwardness of the moment some relief.

We haven’t spoken since.

My best friend has been nudging me for ages to start making mom friends. And something has finally been stirring recently. I don’t like it. I know she’s right and it’s starting to freak me out if I’m being honest.

She has a six-year-old and an approach to motherhood that’s simply different from mine when it comes to socialization and it’s mostly guided by our personalities. Here I am trying to create an independent and culturally-grounded experience at home, and she took her child to every kind of educational opportunity across the county. She is by nature a complete social butterfly — and when she decided to raise her son in the U.S. for a time, she made fast friends with other parents at half-day programs, library events, indoor kid’s gyms, from real estate clientele, and — I think — even Facebook Marketplace customers. But she wasn’t just a mom friend. She quickly became the cool convener and connector she is in every other aspect of her life.

Now this is someone with whom I have a nearly 30-year sisterhood so she knows my quirks and sometimes-reclusive, always structured and working on something nature – and still keeps me around. Better yet, she has always been great at suggesting things for me to try. It’s been wonderful to have her network at the ready even if I can’t operationalize one of my own just yet. She has researched everything and if she hasn’t - she will mine her now vast community of moms and get answers.

I have a phone full of recommendations which I dip into any time I have a chance – often months late.

I don’t know if my read is off but I know and see a lot of moms with defined mom-personalities. Super organized mom. Sporty mom. Crafty mom. Leader of the mom clique. Travel mom. Fashionable moms. Stay at home and power punching working moms. Respect to all the moms (and parents).

If you asked me to define myself as a mom right now I’d say: Struggle-in-the-Juggle mom. Big feelings and Bigger intentions mom. And the most pronounced on some days: Socially awkward mom. I own that. My baby loves me regardless but I didn’t lose all my self-awareness in childbirth.

Here’s the thing about being an introverted child who learned to perform extroversion for survival: you get exceptionally good at it. Too good. Good enough that people are surprised when you tell them you need to go home and lie face down on the couch for two hours to recover from a birthday party.

I was that child. School, family obligations, every room my mother deputized us into — I learned to show up, engage, and leave. My body has always felt regulated and happy out of the crowd. In the crowd, the feeling of being on leaves me depleted in ways I’ve stopped apologizing for.

In high school I played team sports but didn’t hang out on weekends. Didn’t go to the mall. Didn’t do sleepovers — that’s not a Latino culture thing anyway. I had big-personality siblings and friends and never felt the need to compete for space or shine. I was perfectly happy with a book or a journal.

College was an experiment in extroversion that mostly taught me who I actually am — curious, opinionated, and perfectly content with a small circle of people who get me completely.

My sister used to tell me I had too many friends. The truth is I had a wider set of friends that has narrowed at every stage of life and major moment for the better.

The problem is that I have a son who is his own person *smiles with pride*.

He looks at people when we’re out – like really looks at them and when they look back, he does this thing that looks like a salute but it’s an open-handed wave. People love it! They often laugh and wave back – even those with grumpy looking faces.

He is the life of the party. He walks into a room and makes fast friends. He shares without being prompted. He is curious too but so courageous in acting on it – wanting to know about every child he encounters and a bit sad when they leave.

He got none of this from me. That is his gift and his alone. Spirit made him a big personality and gave him to the mama that thought she was gonna have a quiet life.

We were recently at my best friend’s son’s birthday party and I watched something I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

My son surfed around the party. Popping in on pairs and small groups of kids playing. Hovering at the margins. Playing alone for stretches. Eventually he banded together with my other best friend’s daughter — the eleven-year-old who doubles as his big, Tween cousin at gatherings and on vacation. She is loving and safe. Known. Already his.

I watched him from nearby. In the safety of my best friends where I didn’t have to make mom friends because I already had them. Where if I got distracted, I knew they would care for him without a thought.

I saw him seeking. Observing. Trying to understand the social cues of a room full of kids – most of them older - who already knew each other. Watching from the edges of something he wanted to be inside of.

Suddenly I realized we were there - in the same space, at the same event – with two quite different approaches to the same thing: Connection. While he was leaning in to find it. I was retreating to where I know it lives.

That’s where I’ve been in these nearly three years – I’ve retreated into relationships that know me. That have seen me through some big life things as I’ve seen them – no judgement, just steady support. This is a sisterhood that has been patiently waiting for me to get my footing — that hasn’t written me off because I can’t make it out or don’t have the energy to do half of what I used to. It loves me even though I plan my weekends around nap schedules, send ridiculously delayed texts or voice notes, and have slipped on important dates and events while juggling all the things in the MOTHERhood. I’m especially pained by that part but the repair and replenishing of friendships is for another post.

These are relationships I poured into and who have been pouring extra into me in their own ways – some by just giving me the gift of space without severing the ties.

They have seen me hard-charging about work or throwing caution to the wind in a foreign country. They’ve seen me date the wrong guy and, on occasion, a solid one. So of course they’ve seen me squeeze these curves into bodycon dresses, running tights, and — dare I say — bikinis. But for almost three years they’ve seen me in this dazed and confused state of affairs — in literal aesthetic shambles — without saying a single discouraging word.

It’s a cast curated over time. It fits like a pair of shoes that have danced to the best beats.

I should also say — many of them are mothering magicians in their own right. Keeping babies, aging parents, dogs, cats, and friends afloat at all times while balancing careers and humanity. I’ve seen it with my own eyes and been my own version of a friend to them.

I guess what I’m trying to say in all of this is that my son is over there leaning into every new connection. And I’m over here retreating into the ones that already fit perfectly.

The whisper that I’m shorting him of something started quietly. It gets a little louder every time I watch him play alone or hover at the edges of a group he wants to join.

The difference between us is this: I have anchors. My circle keeps me from feeling like I have to make new friends for myself — I already have mine. But he doesn’t have that yet. He has a whole community behind him — family, people who love him deeply. But he doesn’t have his age-compatible friends yet. The ones who will become his.

Those don’t appear. They get built. Through experiences and play and showing up in the same room week after week until something clicks. I can put him in the rooms. I can show up to the gym and the library and the birthday parties. I can make the parent friends (slowly) – but some of this he is going to have to learn on his own.

And that’s the part that breaks your heart a little. Your sweet, social, life-of-the-party kid is going to be accepted and rejected. He’s going to hover at the edges of something he wants to be inside of and not always find his way in. That’s not a failure. Ok maybe sometimes it is. But that’s living and that’s where the learning begins.

Maybe if I had kids when most of my friends did. None of this would be an issue.

But the fact of the matter is I had this baby at this time. And maybe — just maybe — it’s because I too have some relearning to do.

How do you parent your child while reparenting yourself?

How do you find your (newer) people for the newer stages of life when you already have some pretty spectacular ones?

Making mom friends won’t replace my crew. But they’ll likely understand the newer parts of me better — because they’re living through it in real time.

I just have to make sure I’m not the reason he has fewer rooms to walk into while I figure that out.

For now, it’s back to Friday night baby gym class and working up the nerve to make small talk with another parent.

I can do this.

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On this third Mother’s Day together there are things on my heart that I need you to know.

The idea of you. The manifestation of you. The you I have faith you will become — has been and will forever be my greatest act.

Something you need to know off the top: my journey to you has been a long and winding road with some pretty hard turns away from things women in our family have seen, believed, done, and passed down. This is not a judgment — this is honest gratitude for their example and sacrifice that led to me being able to be the person that I am. And more importantly, your mother.

Because of them I was born in a country where I got a world-class education, have a career, traveled the world, and done plenty of things you’ll learn about in our time together. But the most important thing I want you to know about the legacy I inherited — and that I am now passing along to you — is that we have been given the gift of healing. Generations of women sacrificed a lot to get me here. I pray that someday we will sit together in a home in the heavens and hold each other in a feeling of victory. But before any of that, I still have work to do. And it continues with you.

For what seemed like an eternity, I watched women I love, women I know, and complete strangers — be mothers. Longing from a safe distance for the essence that seemed to hover just above their skin. I watched them juggle life and people and careers and art and community. In more cases than not, I also saw a discernment that fueled their ability to stop, pivot, repair, and move on in the face of things I wouldn’t have had the instinct to navigate the same way.

I often wondered if I ever would. If the hope of motherhood was just that — hope — and not the actual ability to have everything it would take to cut it at this most important role in life.

The answer turned out to be neither yes nor no. It turned out to be: become her first.

For years before you arrived I had been on a journey to interrogate intergenerational trauma and regulate how it had been running rampant throughout my life and my body. This went against cultural norms that had modeled women keeping secrets, sucking it up, staying, leaving or living in guilt. Most of all - denying themselves to save face in a culture where el que dirán matters more than our humanity.

At some point I decided there was no way I could bring forward new life in that operating system.

So I went beyond what I was taught — about relationships, spirituality, and self-care. I had a lot to untangle with tools that were in some cases entirely new to me. Imagine cleaning out a garage stuffed to the brim with things and memories — taking it all out and sorting it. By the time I’d removed it all and looked at the shell of myself, I knew it wouldn’t all fit back inside. There were choices to make. Some would be radical.

What did I want in a family? What was I willing to do to have that family? How did I need to change to build it?

When it finally felt like I could stand in the middle of that proverbial garage and look around — the most important pieces were all where they needed to be. So I closed the door on things and people. And readied myself for you.

Choosing you was radical. In my family. In my culture. At my age. On my own.

As someone who grew up in activism I have always felt conviction about the things I believe make the world better — respect, rights, resourcing. I’ve marched, knocked doors, petitioned, voted, fundraised, and spread the word on causes and candidates. But nothing — nothing — compares to the call to action I feel as your mother.

And I want you to know something I only recently learned: this holiday started as a protest.

In 1870 Julia Ward Howe — poet, abolitionist, author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” — wrote a Mother’s Day Proclamation calling women across the world to rise up against war and violence. She believed that the people who bear the true cost of conflict had a responsibility to shape the world differently. Her Mother’s Day for Peace was celebrated for decades. Then it was quietly replaced by brunches and bouquets.

I am not surprised. There is something about the people who physically bring life into the world that is just different.

And your Mama has always known it.

On our first Mother’s Day together, you were nearly five months strong in my belly. We sat on the couch in our home and did a gender reveal for three — me, Chico, and Rico. Affirmation of what I already knew in my heart. Because I knew, when you finally came to me, you would be a son.

I hosted a brunch in our happy little house and gathered the three generations of women in our family. They gifted me the most precious thing — a locket with a tiny picture of your sonogram on one side and a tiny picture of Chico and Rico on the other. They didn’t say much, probably because they’re not as mushy as your Mama. But as I looked around the table at the tears brimming in their eyes — that momento was an applause. For the branch I had somewhat unexpectedly — and highly untraditionally — added to our family tree. A mother with a different reality and a baby highly anticipated. Both held and supported — especially by the women in our family.

Each of these 1,000 days you’ve been earthside I want you to know there have been countless moments where I’ve had to make choices about our family. About staying a single mom. About the type of work I can do and afford to do for us. About who cares for you. About potty training and the next meal and all the things in between.

Every day I make decisions about how to make the waking hours count — for and with you. Some days it’s about racing an unforgiving clock that doesn’t give a sh*t about my feelings. It cares about work, productivity, deliverables. But work doesn’t define me the way it once did. You are now my compass both moral and actual. My days are now defined by the minutes — the hours — I can show up for you. And that feels radical.

Professional recognition, promotions, projects don’t mean what they used to. I want to wake up and start my day with my kid. I want to get home in time to hear you still energized by your day — to take in all your new words and antics, read stories and sing songs until we both pass out. That is a radical reality in a world I spent most of my life trying to feed with my productivity.

As a brown, single, working mother in the United States of America — each of those choices requires me to stand firm in the reality that this world would neither flinch at my failure nor strain itself to keep me from it. Your Mama is out here defying gravity itself to keep you safe. Because that is my most important job. In spite of whoever and whatever.

The more the postpartum fog clears, the more I realize how much of my anxiety about parenting these past three years has been based on things beyond my control. Impossible expectations to know, do, buy, create, and curate a childhood made for television. Influencers. Pressure. Judgment. The noise telling me I’m doing it wrong.

But you are happy and healthy and growing and learning. So however I’m doing this thing — it’s just right.

And that realization has given me the most radical voice of all. The one in my head that drowns out the doubt, the fear, the imposter syndrome. The one that says: you are enough. He just wants you.

Motherhood has also changed how I see the world beyond our front door.

Something about this experience has sharpened my conviction about everything — especially children. All of them. I see you in every child. I feel the weight of every child who isn’t safe, isn’t fed, isn’t held, isn’t seen. That expansion of love — that inability to look away — is itself a radical act in a world that asks us to keep our heads down and our circles small.

My Mother’s Day is a protest. Against anything and everything that makes the world less safe, less just, and less loving for our children.

Julia Ward Howe understood that assignment.

So do I.

I love you Numa. More than these words. More than this life.

Happy Mother’s Day to us. 🏡

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I lost count of the times I started this piece and didn’t have the words to do it any justice. I could write literal volumes about this topic and the ones who brought it to life. They deserve a more eloquent eulogy than I can offer. But I have to start somewhere. Consider this the first of many posts about beings so special that they continue to be present in my life in new ways. Nearly two decades of moments and memories build the sort of patterns that become part of the very fibers in someone’s life. Just know that every mention of them In the MOTHERhood will focus on the happy even when we brush up against the sad— because that was their greatest gift to me.

Sundays are my favorite days.

They start slow and linger in an ease I’ve been missing for a while. I miss it the way you miss something you loved without resenting what it looks like now. I miss the way Sundays used to feel because the ones who made them feel that way are gone. And every corner of my house — but especially the living room — reminds me of what will never be the same.

Before my son, there were two others.

The first came to me on a fall night in 2007. My stepdad, known in our family as a dog whisperer, walked into the kitchen and placed a tiny black puff ball on the floor. I watched from the living room in my parent’s house as he stood up and walked away from it, only to see it moving quickly to follow him.

I had no idea that bite-sized bundle of curls would speak to my soul in its native language without saying a single word.

We named him Chico. And from that night, he was mine.

For nearly 17 years of my life and all of his, it was the most intimate relationship I had ever experienced. Through every grueling work schedule, every hard season, every late night he never failed to meet me at the door. In whatever condition I arrived. At whatever hour. To remind me I was loved. No. Adored.

Chico was fully bilingual. It was one of his many superpowers. He understood English and Spanish with equal fluency and responded to both like the well-traveled gentleman he was. He walked around the neighborhood like he owned the block. And honestly, he did. Ever the magnet for loving attention and the inspiration for at least four friends who got themselves mini poodles over the years.

But Chico was a deliverer of a serious side-eye and attitude to match. He never took to anyone I dated. And, as a happy single mama who’s survived some pretty tough endings, I can admit he - the constant companion there to pick up the pieces of me every time – was always right. I wish I could’ve told him that.

Rico came later. Younger, feisty, the most overprotective Yorkie who ever lived. Nine pounds of tight little muscle who wore the underbite of a bulldog with absolute pride. If he could see himself in the mirror, he would no doubt see a lion staring back. Anyone who even looked in the direction of our house would hear him sound off. The alarm system was a literal waste of money because Rico captured motion and the faintest sound before the sensors ever could. It drove me nuts because he wouldn’t stop until I soothed him or yelled at him to shut up. He reminded me of Scooby-Doo’s little nephew Scrappy (my Gen X cartoon kids know who I’m talking about).

Once you were in with Rico, there was no turning back. He was a beggar for affection. He’d sit in my lap or sprawl under my desk while I worked, grateful for every cuddle or even a stroke of my foot through his soft feathery hair. He was my blonde all-American boy.

We were a little band of misfit toys - each of us a little weird and temperamental. Loners and companions. We survived heartbreak. A pandemic. Grueling job demands. And broke with a family norm or two. Our home was a little jungle with Chico the Silverback, Rico the Lion. The duo also known as the Jungle Brothers and the many random names given to them by yours truly. In our house they reigned supreme and in our extended family where it was fair to think I would remain childless, they were recognized as my kids and treated as such. These boys walked around like they owned the place and I worked for them.

On drives they loved poking their heads out the windows, ears blown back, tongues hanging out the sides of their mouths. Whenever they heard a fire truck they would start howling as if personally boosting the call for urgency. And though they had very different temperaments, they were competitive with each other about who was closer to me and who got more attention. And as the youngest child myself, I had to remind Rico about the chain of command and the whole thing respecting your elders and waiting your turn.

For a glorious time, nothing mattered more than living life with these two amazing souls.

As someone who grew up in a house that was always full of extended family, family friends, and the steady hum of other people’s needs, space and fun always took a back seat to duty and responsibilities. My mom ran the house and everything including fun, which wasn’t really fun even when we had the house to ourselves.

On the weekends, sometimes Saturday and other times Sundays depending on her work schedule, my mother would wake us up blasting cumbia or merengue to get us out of bed and to cleaning bright and early. Each of us yawned our way through a bowl of frosted flakes and got to work. My brother taking out the trash and doing yard work, my sister in the kitchen, and me doing any of the miscellaneous tasks fit for the weak link of the group – usually dusting around my mom’s 57 million random trinkets.

But if my mom was really feeling a song, we got called into the living room for an improptu dance break. She took turns shuffling us around, giving us a spin saying that no child of hers was going to embarrass her by not knowing how to dance. So we all went along and just as we were getting loose, the song ended and we got sent back to our cleaning posts.

Those brief minutes were for movement no matter what it looked like or what beat we were on. We danced our hearts out and that living room LIVED.

By the time I bought and moved into my own house, I was 39. Yes, it could’ve been earlier but, again, I come from a large intergenerational immigrant family and as the youngest daughter, I had a role to play. But that’s another story. More relevant here is that I bought a little old house up the street from my mom’s. My dad had recently passed and I was feeling untethered in that way losing a parent will have you out here. It made me question a lot about where I was in life and all I wanted to do anchor myself — for myself and by myself. When I renovated that house I promised it would be my happy house.

Over 100 days, I gutted the house, put the walls up, and moved in with Chico. We rescued Rico nearly a year later. And we started our own living room dance tradition.

Sundays were for living.

No matter how hard the week had beat us down, Sundays filled our cups.

In our glory days, nobody left the bedroom before everyone else. We moved as a unit and headed straight to the back door. They went out for morning business and a stretch while I made coffee, told Alexa to get NPR going, and served breakfast. I’d do a quick meditation and journal while the coffee cooled to room temp. Then the second cup. Lots of pets and cuddles and kisses. Then the day.

On Sundays there was one rule: no rushing. During the pandemic I’d tune into church service from the couch while they napped or lounged around. Then a stroll around the neighborhood — the pitter patter of their paws and little butts with barely-there tails bouncing down the block like they were on an important mission. Rico always desperately tugging at his leash while Chico mostly cruised off leash as if surveying his properties.

Afternoons were for errands — usually groceries so I could prep their food for the week. Yes, you’ve heard of crazy cat ladies. But have you heard of crazy dog moms? Because she is I and I am her. I had my soul dog and my bonus dog at the same time — a gift I was determined to extend by giving them the healthiest life I could. For years I cooked their food. Figured out how to use clippers to groom them at home. I did, however, draw the line at ear hair pulling and bum bum gland expressing because some things are better left to professionals.

Between errands or as we waited for the afternoon to cool down in the summers, we danced to whatever beat was calling. Chico was my main partner. He indulged me every time. Propped up in my arms like a dance lead, he curled right up in my arms and went along for the spin. Meanwhile, jealous little Rico would bark around us as if he wanted to be picked up too but he didn’t. It was just a little FOMO. I would occasionally film and I’m so grateful to have those videos.

Sundays were also for unlimited snacks and time with friends and these boys were loving hosts for the most part though Chico wasn’t crazy about being chased around by kids.

At the end of the day, one last business outing. Then back inside, into our beds, and lights out before the Sunday scaries set in.

For nearly seven years we wove a life together — routines, annoying habits, and countless moments of living exactly as we wanted. We were all accepted and sometimes just tolerated but we were always loved.

We were the family I built. In my house. On my terms.

In the two weeks I waited for confirmation of my pregnancy I laid around a lot and they were right there with me. It was as if they already knew what was coming or maybe they had been saying their own prayers with me all along.

The day we found out, it was just the three of us at home and we jumped for joy and danced in that living room like we’d won the lotto.

Throughout the coming months I had never felt so connected to them. I could literally see them checking in on me more than ever before. In moments of stress around deadlines to wrap up work and start prepping the house for the incoming family member. They seemed to coordinated shifts patrolling me, stepping in just when I needed some co-regulation. I lost count of the times I asked them not to leave before the baby arrived. There’s no way I could have held a pregnancy and mourning together.

In spite of their own failing health — they kept that promise.

Rico had his first seizure the day before my baby shower. I was 7.5 months pregnant and threw myself on the floor without thinking, holding him through it, repeating Mama’s here over and over as if saying it would make it stop. Eventually it did. And he came back to me.

The baby came early and sometimes I’m grateful because for six weeks we were a family of four.

Then Rico was gone. I came home from the hospital that night inconsolable. Having to pump while balling my eyes out was crazy. And it was crazier to dump that milk so as not to give the baby a taste of that defeat.

Chico leaned in to comfort me, not leaving my side for a second for weeks - months, even as I watched him enter an accelerated decline.

Then on a cold January day I came home from my son’s six month checkup to find Chico collapsed in the living room. Barely able to move his eyes to meet mine. The space between us felt so thin.

My mom tried to tell me what had happened but all I heard was, “I think he’s ready.”

I wasn’t ready. I would never be ready.

How could I ever be ready?

Why couldn’t I have both of my babies if only for a while longer?

As night came I made him a bed in a laundry basket with cushions and puppy pads. He wouldn’t eat. Barely drank water. Made no sounds. I lifted him up to show him to my son who I was rolling around the house in a stroller because holding him for long periods was still painful for me. I played music for them. Told them stories. I wanted so bad for them to know each other. To create memories they would remember when I knew it was impossible. I wanted to dance with them and have the videos to laugh about years in the future.

My mom put the baby down and went to bed so I could spend what would be my last night with Chico in the room where we had been so happy for so many years.

We danced slowly as I recited my thanks for every adventure big and small. I ran my fingers over his curls and wiped the tears that dampened them. I’ll never forget the way he fixed his eyes on me and said so much without a word.

Throughout the night I dozed for short intervals couch, waking in a panic that I had missed his departure. Pumping and dumping more breastmilk now nervous that I would dry up completely and not produce anymore for the baby. This went on until morning. He was still there.

And later that next day, I felt his heartbeat for the last time in my arms.

The details of that final moment is overcast by the memory of our last dance and that feels like a bit of mercy on his part.

A few months before he passed, I was driving when “Stand By Me” came on the radio. Something nudged me to send myself a note for when the time came. When it did, I found Tracy Chapman’s live rendition and sobbed over it on repeat for hours. The tenderness of her voice over those deeply meaningful words about the gift of companionship and the courage it gives you met me exactly where I was.

I opened Instagram recently to watch a reel from our last night together and got a notification that the song was no longer available. The anger, the panic, the searing sadness. The algorithm was reminding me who’s the boss. A cruel way to strip me of the dignity of mourning the way I wanted to — by going back to replay that last moment in our living room. As if adding insult to injury, the notice prompted me to pick another song. No thanks. This is the one. And the only one.

In early motherhood I’ve had to hold unbearable grief alongside brand new joy. I mostly survived it because unconditional love is truly undefeated and I was lucky enough to receive it three doses. First from my pups and now from my baby.

Rico, my younger pup, waited years for the privilege of sleeping in the bed on special occasions. That was Chico’s privilege and I had promised it would eventually be his in ways I remember being promised things as a younger sibling. He never got to fully claim that and for months after he left — and oftentimes still — I long for his annoyingly protective presence at the foot of my bed.

And like I’ve said to my family and closest friends, Chico is someone I will miss every single day of the rest of my life. Some grief you just have to carry because it is such a reminder of something much greater.

I often think I would not be the mother I am today without having loved them first. They expanded my heart to the capacity of motherhood before human motherhood arrived. They taught me what it meant to show up every day for something that needed me completely. To put someone else’s needs first without resentment. To love without conditions or expectations and receive the love that is given with immense gratitude because it does make the weight of the world a bit lighter.

What a gift to have had a family of four — if only for a brief moment.

Sundays are still for dancing in the living room.

It just looks a little different.

NPR is still going. The coffee still cools but now it’s while my son FaceTimes with family and I get breakfast together. In the absence of the Jungle Brothers, this baby has kept two things alive in this house almost on their behalf.

The first is the fearless energy. He will try anything — going full speed down the hall and around the open space loop in the same way I used to play with Chico and Rico. The same intensity and playfulness. The same confidence that this house belongs to him.

The second is the knowing. He always gets closer when I’m feeling emotionally vulnerable — as if he can sense I need proximity and isn’t afraid of my unspoken emotional energy. He moves toward me instead of away. He always has. As I move towards him.

The howling at fire trucks has been replaced by a toddler who stops everything he’s doing to announce: BOMBEROS!

We’re building new memories. All of us — me, my son, and the spirits of the ones who taught me how to love this much.

This living room still lives.

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I had heard of women voluntarily planning C-Sections but surgery was not how I thought it would go down for me. Over two years later, during this Cesarean Birth Awareness Month, I think I’m ready to make some sense of how I birthed a baby and myself at the same time.

Before I take the dive down memory lane, a disclaimer: I haven’t openly spoken about this beyond a close circle of friends and family. As much as I know in my bones that bringing life into the world is the most magnificent thing I’ll ever do, the final hour of pregnancy was scary as hell. The retelling of the story alone still brings me to tears and they’re not all happy.

Like many cycles in life, pregnancy was a chrysalis that nurtured a lot of growth and change but I didn’t expect to experience death and birth in the way I did. I’m no stranger to cycles and the whole beginnings and endings relationship but this was next level. By your 40s most of us have had a share of love cycles — the whirlwind, the building, the falling apart, the post-mortem, and even emerged from the chaos feeling and looking HOT. We’ve also had a fair share of the killer cycles where we’ve confronted mistakes, toxic traits, and family secrets that drag us through the pits of hell before we’re left clinging to life. Still none of those situations could’ve prepared me to survive labor and delivery.

The credit for that goes to having experienced a different kind of cycle. The only one that predictably calls me to reflection, surrender, and gratitude for forty days and forty nights every year. Lent is when – but also where - I practice stillness, lower the volume on fear, and try to hold big feelings of love and sacrifice in balance with honest accountability. There’s a period of waiting, focusing, giving control over to hope- and then an emergence. Who knew Lent would prepare me for motherhood?

This post isn’t about religion, though I praise my Creator, my Savior, and La Virgen - it’s about how a practice of surrender built the muscles needed to survive the most altering moment and pivot to a new me. And while I didn’t plan to write about this just yet, it’s not lost on me that is what came up when I sat to write over the Easter weekend.

I want to talk about the night my son was born. Not all of it — I have to keep some of it for us. But I want to tell you about the night that changed the entire world for me.

It was the end of a quiet weekend home with Chico and Rico in the middle of a heat wave with unusually rough winds that took out the power in our area. We arrived at the hospital near midnight and the baby was breech. My water broke spontaneously an hour or so before and I almost didn’t realize it. There wasn’t a gushing flow like you see on tv so I didn’t panic, I was more concerned it was a bladder issue. Trust me, at a certain point in pregnancy you stop thinking straight and you might also pee on yourself if you cough or sneeze from time to time.

He wasn’t due for another five weeks but my body began evicting him before either of us was ready and before anyone could do anything to stop or delay it. There was just no time. Not for a C-section prep course or even an extensive Google search. Not for a birth plan or even a walk through with the doctor. I hadn’t planned for this to be my only option.

My mom was still in Nicaragua for my uncle’s burial, and the Wi-Fi signal in the rural community where they were staying made it impossible to reach her. The last thing she said to me before she left was: don’t let the baby come before I get back. I had assured her he wouldn’t. I went into labor the night before she was due home.

My sister was with me. Stoic and steady. She’d had two pregnancies and two live births so when she told me everything would be ok – I clung to that.

A nurse brought in forms for me to sign and while I read them I couldn’t process the information fast enough. Again, my logical brain was off. It was all lizard brain from this point forward. I remember telling my sister that if the worst happened, I needed her to do everything she could. I alone would carry the fault and guilt for anything that went wrong but she had to help me because I hadn’t yet prepared things and didn’t want my mom or her to have to figure it all out without me. I couldn’t do that to them. I had a healthy pregnancy so I never anticipated being in this predicament. That night I felt the weight of the risk in childbirth.

I signed the document. Crossed myself and asked for divine protection over me and my baby. The rest was out of my hands.

The nurses wheeled me to the operating room leaving my sister behind.

The operating room was so bright and chilly. I climbed onto the edge of a bed where I had to crouch over my legs as far as my belly would allow so the anesthesiologist could administer an injection. I had to hold my breath to avoid any movement that might screw their aim up. I think they said I would feel something but at that point I didn’t. My brain was shutting down.

Within a few minutes a nurse started poking me with the tip of a pin and asking if I could feel anything but I couldn’t. My emergency responders were turned off. Next thing I know, I was helped onto my back with arms stretched out in a T-position. I stared up at the ceiling — sterile, uniform, not one thing to focus on. Hospitals should paint murals on operating room ceilings. Anyone enduring a life-altering moment in there deserves something beautiful to look at.

There was muffled pop music. Machines beeping. A NICU team taking their position. My doctor appeared — a man I had met only hours before and couldn’t have picked out of a lineup at gunpoint. He told me he would do his best or something like that. Again, brain off and hearing was fading too.

A curtain rose just below my breasts and my sister took her place over my left shoulder.

It was so damn cold.

I couldn’t feel the seven layers of my abdominal wall being breached. The shifting of organs to get to him. The reaching for the pineapple-sized love of my life.

Everything sounded like I was submerged in a pool. Audible but cloudy. I told my sister I was cold. She requested a warm blanket but it was cold within minutes. I told her I was cold on the inside. I couldn’t stop my teeth from chattering or my arms from trembling.

Pressure. Pressure. Pressure. I heard the doctor say that as I was overcome by what felt like someone pushing down on the top of my stomach to push something out of the bottom. I was suffocating. He was suffocating me. I tried to breathe but could only take small inhales. I said nothing to preserve my air.

The ceiling tiles began to shift up and down. It was more than an aggressive tug. If it wasn’t to bring my child to safety I would have called it a violent attack.

I felt numb. A single tear streamed from my left eye to my ear.

I wasn’t sure if things were happening as they were supposed to or if I was on the edge of losing my life. But for the first time ever — I felt I might be. Nothing was in my control. Not my life or his. Something was yanked out of my body that night and it was more than that baby.

I didn’t hear him scream. For several seconds after the doctor lifted his hands from my body all I could hear were the machines.

And then suddenly, the sound of my son roaring beyond the drape.

The NICU team took him first. I told my sister to go to him — so he could hear his family and know that we were there. I didn’t want his first moments to be surrounded by strangers. I didn’t want him to feel alone or abandoned by us in those welcoming minutes. She quickly pivoted to him and I could hear her calling him by his name. Making small talk with the nurses. Telling him who he was. She coo’ed at him as I imagined him struggling to reach for my body – his home.

Meanwhile, the nausea was strangling me. The room was spinning.

They lowered him onto my chest. This tiny ball of warmth settled my trembling body for a brief moment. It was as if our nervous systems recognized each other in that instant and said to one another: we’re together and we’re safe.

This is the exact moment our eyes met for the first time. The moment we fell in love. Yes, we had a love bond of a different form before that moment. But there was something more expansive about this first touch and look.

I wish it could have lasted just a bit longer. That we could have savored the unspoken connection I had envisioned would come in the delivery room. In the U.S., it’s not uncommon to see those tear-jerking videos of C-Section births where babies are laid on the chests of their mothers with perfectly rosy cheeks and curled lashes for a dreamy Golden Hour. Some even posing for pictures. Those clearly weren’t unplanned surgeries happening at 3:00 am.

Instead of relishing in the tenderness in that most sterile space, I felt an uncontrollable sensation rise in my body and it completely changed the moment in an instant. It happened fast but I was able to tell my sister to pick the baby up. The next few minutes were a blur that is still too raw to talk about but suffice it to say it was the scariest of my life.

Every time I look back on that night, I realize new things. Time is lifting the fog and letting me see how massive childbirth was and how different I am because of it.

That night, on that operating table, the me I had been for 45 years and I disconnected — literally. She stayed in that room and I didn’t even know I left without her. I didn’t have a moment to say goodbye. Or maybe that is who I mourned with a single tear. I didn’t know I would only see her again in pictures and memories. I didn’t know I’d be looking for her in the mirror every day since.

That night was the end of her life and the birth of both my son and me as his mother.

It would take me two years to find the word for what happened in that room and who this new person/mother/me is.

I don’t fully know yet. But that’s what I’m exploring In the MOTHERhood — following breadcrumbs, looking for others who can relate, and doing some good old-fashioned storytelling along the way.

A few months ago I didn’t know how to describe the transformation I’ve been experiencing since my son came into my life. People would ask how I was doing and the answer was a word salad with a super-sized serving of emotions. I had no idea if I was growing, shrinking, climbing, falling, or moving at all. I know I’m not alone in this but trust me, when you’re going through it, it feels like you are.

The word Matrescence wasn’t even on my radar. Not in years of minding my health and fertility. Not in eight months of pregnancy. Not in any of this postpartum tangle.

Around February I came across a post that defined Matrescence as a profound identity transformation that women go through in becoming mothers — affecting them physically, mentally, and emotionally. Where had that word been all this time? And why wasn’t it part of mainstream language or even in the dictionary?

That’s the thing about the MOTHERhood — you arrive in this place long before the language to explain it does.

Of the three dimensions of Matrescence (physical, mental, and emotional), I’ve already written a three-part series about navigating physical health and wellness. That will continue to be a central theme of this publication and my personal experiences. But this post reaches beyond.

The mental shift begins where the physical changes meet the psychological journey.

As the youngest daughter in a big, extended family of immigrants, I was the introverted child in a clan and a world that required extroversion, sacrifice and – everyone’s favorite - people pleasing. I figured out how to do those things well for decades-- across relationships, careers, and even versions of myself.

It took me a while but I did a significant amount of self-work to get it/myself together. Therapy. Solo travel. Hard conversations. I built a life I was genuinely proud of and I knew who I was inside it. Honorable mention to the COVID-19 Pandemic for the excuse – ahem, opportunity- to be the homebody I long-waited to be. By the time I got pregnant, I welcomed the chance to hibernate with my dogs and the life growing inside me.

But those four and a half months of winter baby baking were a literal blink of an eye. Before I knew it, pregnancy started changing my actual brain function and my mental health had to plan accordingly. Out the window went the little quiet corners of my mind and home. The collective culture mentality came rushing right back. That entailed people knowing my business, having opinions about said business, and yes, offering help too. All of these things scream vulnerability, loss of privacy, and feeling like I owe someone else my best behavior which I had worked hard to carefully avoid for many years. So yes, I’ve been swallowing my pride a lot and it doesn’t usually feel good.

Collective culture brought me back to the teachings of doing for others – even when it took a personal toll. But not all is heavy – there are plenty of beautiful things about this way of life and I’m learning to move in and with it differently. Learning to receive care, support, help, love has been one of the quieter transformations of this season of life. And one of the most significant. I’m not great at it and I definitely struggle with a lot of guilt but I’m grateful for the people who are holding me in ways big and small these days because this parenting thing is not a game.

As for the emotional shift, it has been the most difficult part of my new life to navigate because everything and everyone (in my head) – but especially my hormones- betrayed me.

Again, back to collectivist culture where sacrifice is obligatory and guilt is often the price for non-compliance. I’ve worked on resetting my big feelings before having a child because I never want that to be their inheritance. That whole thing of doing as your parents say because you owe them is obligation dressed up as love. The sacrifice bit made me so angry as a kid and young adulthood— passing on things I wanted, complying through tears, giving from a place of scarcity and resentment. I remember the fury of it. How I would angry cry and do what I was told. I probably had this baby later in life because Lord knows I had to work through a lot to get here.

But sacrifice in motherhood is different. Markedly, inexplicably different.

Today when I make choices — some of which require me to make sacrifices — they are inevitably tied to Numa. My work decisions. My relationships. My schedule. My budget. What I do for fun. All of it filtered through him and his needs. And I am completely at peace with that.

There is no judgment or debt involved. No resentment waiting on the other side. What’s left is something between care and devotion — and the distance between those two kinds of giving is the emotional transformation matrescence has taught me.

That shift — from obligation to devotion — is seismic and what grounds love and purpose for me now. I know it will continue to evolve but it is also why I can never go back to get the me I lost the night I gave birth. She brought me as far as she could – through so many trials and triumphs. But it’s as if she knew all along she wouldn’t be coming with me and didn’t want to spoil my magical pregnancy with the sadness of a goodbye.

The love is what I get to wake up to every morning and sleep with every night. It’s what fuels my days and what will carry me through to my last breath.

I think this universally belongs to the mothers. The ones who risk our lives — and lose parts of our own — to bring new life forward. That transformation may now have a name – Matrescence – but the lived experience is so much more.

Childbirth was brutal and it was beautiful because it has made me a stronger version of myself. Today, I see the world through new eyes and other people as someone's mother or child first. I also fully recognize the privilege of the care I received — in a world where mother and infant mortality hang by threads every minute of every day, not every birth story is honored and not all get to be told by a mother.

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I had a full life before he arrived.

I want to say that clearly because I think it matters. I was not waiting. I was not incomplete. I had built something for myself— a career, a business, a community, a home filled with love and two four-legged dog sons who brought me more joy than most humans.

For years, I struggled to understand how to love and prioritize myself over everything and everyone else. It was not how I was hard wired culturally or in my family. But at some point, I locked in and did the self-work to reset my life.

My family had stopped asking when I was going to get married. Or if I wanted to have kids. They stopped asking who I was dating. I lived alone. Worked a lot. Traveled solo. Had a healthy chosen family with which I weathered many storms. The pandemic thankfully did the job of helping me purge relationships that were unnecessarily lingering. All in all, I was not waiting for anyone to come save me. I wasn’t waiting for anyone to choose me in order to live my life. I knew that was not God’s plan for me.

That kind of grounding required surrender and surrender has never been something I’ve done easily.

But I want to go back even further—before pregnancy itself. Because this story doesn’t start with a pregnancy test.

It starts in a courtyard outside one of the oldest Catholic churches in the Americas. My mother and I had been walking through a city that felt lost in time. As the sun went down, we stopped to rest outside the church, near an elder woman seated at a small table. She reminded me of the Bahainas in the northeast of Brazil. She wore a long white flowing skirt and matching top with a flirty-ruffle neckline. The white so bright against her darker skin tone that it seemed to pop. She was adorned with a rosary and stacks of beaded bracelets on both of her wrists.

She sat humming in front of a deck of cards and trinkets. She had the kind of presence you don’t walk past without noticing. And I am curious so I approached and asked if she would do a reading with us. I don’t actually remember if she used the cards, or just the palm of my hands but she started off by sharing with me very specific things she couldn’t possibly have gathered from any hints on my clothing.

And let me be clear here, I am a practicing Catholic raised in the Latin American tradition of the faith and cultural traditions of the people. I believe in one God, Jesus, and La Virgen— and also the gifts some people among us have to see and understand things the rest of us can’t.

The woman told us we could ask three questions.

I sat first and encouraged Mami to sit a little bit away so she didn’t hear everything I was going to ask. I knew what I was going to ask so I started with the question I was most curious about: Will I have children?

Among the many things she shared, she told me I would have two sons.

I took that. Filed it somewhere quiet. And kept living my life.

Years later I was in Paris with my nieces — my goddaughters, the girls who feel like mine in every way that matters. We were strolling through Le Marais with no particular destination, when something pulled me into a baby boutique. Just to look.

I walked around and stopped in front of a sweet little blue velour onesie. I ran my fingers down the baby outfit and said without thinking: maybe I should buy something for my future baby here.

My nieces encouraged me. My younger niece asked if I’d ever thought of baby names. I said I had. Just once. With someone who ended up causing me a lot of pain so just that once.

My older niece asked if I wanted boys or girls.

I said I would be happy with a healthy baby but told them I imagined myself a boy mom.

What would you name him?

Without hesitation I said: Numa.

I could see the confusion on their faces. They didn’t know that name yet.

I bought the onesie and tucked it away in the packaging for what would become years.

Four years later, I didn’t have one son. I had two — Chico and Rico.

I wasn’t sure if those were the sons the sage woman in white had seen for me or if I’d someday have a human son. But it didn’t matter the way it once did. I was their mother and I felt that in every way. They had been with me through the thrills of falling in love and surviving heartbreak. Through tremendous loss and countless changes. Through it all, they gave me a companionship I was sure nobody could come close to topping.

And then — just as my mind stopped racing about a biological clock and as the physical yearning for motherhood that came on strong every month started to subside — something started to shift.

Just before I found out I was pregnant I took a trip to Aruba. I was overdue for a visit to the sea — the place where I am always the version of myself I wish I could be every day. I stayed in a sweet boutique hotel within walking distance of the beach and had lazy days by the sea and lazier afternoons by the pool. I read. Journaled. Indulged in fancy dinners before moonlit walks back to the hotel. And I slept in every day.

On the third night I woke from a dream I hope to never forget. It was one of those dreams that feel so real you think you’re awake.

I was at the beach, looking out at the water where some children were playing, when a man’s voice came from over my right shoulder — as if he were looking out at one of his own children in the group. “Who’s that boy?” he asked.

Without hesitation I heard myself say: He’s my son.

Two months later, I found out I was pregnant.

I was home with Chico and Rico when the doctor’s office called with my pregnancy test results.

I had a handheld voice recorder ready — to capture the news.

We sat on the couch together and when I heard the words I screamed with excitement. And then I cried. I hung up and sobbed in the fetal position with the dogs howling and sniffing and pawing as if trying to rescue me.

It was our news that day.

For a few hours before I gathered with my mom and sister. Before I called my best friends. Months before I shared with most people. I was flat out on the floor in my living room going from laughing to crying and taking every lick and nudge the boys gave me.

This was how we marked every milestone on the journey— me and my boys in our house. And that felt sacred.

Pregnancy Announcement., Easter 2023

The envelope with the gender results had been sitting on my desk for months. The thing about pregnancy when you’re old-er is that you get tested early and a lot so you’re constantly getting results. When my family found out they were annoyed I hadn’t opened it. I could hear them — just open it, Caro. We need to know pink or blue. Don’t do that gender-neutral thing!

But I didn’t want some cheesy gender reveal with pyrotechnic dust or balloon popping. I could have gone the whole time without knowing because I already knew. I felt it.

On Resurrection Day, Chico and Rico made it official with an adorable announcement and a few weeks later, on Mother’s Day, I opened the envelope.

This time I made a little video to record the moment. I had a red placard for a daughter and another for a son and pressed record. I reviewed the results and there it was—confirmation my son was in transit.

The signs were always leading me to him.

Since I was hosting Mother’s Day brunch at my house, I quickly wrote cards delivering the news. One for my mom: Happy Mother’s Day from your grandson. One for my sister: Happy Mother’s Day from your nephew.

We sat over a spread made by yours truly—the lesser of the chefs in the family—at a table decorated by me—also the person with the least sense of interior décor.

I handed my mom and sister the cards and asked them to open together.

My sister went first. She gasped and put her hands over her mouth.

My mom read slowly. It didn’t seem to register. My niece leaned over, read it — and let out a massive high-pitched scream that made us all jump.

My mom was stunned. Blank expression. And then she came to.

It was hilarious.

We had played an old wives tale gender game at Easter and the majority swore it would be a girl — well, except my mom, who probably only backed me up so I wouldn’t feel lonely. We were right.

Pregnancy was not what I expected. It was so much more.

Again, I had a full life before this baby but pregnancy made me feel more alive than ever. I was both busting at the seams with excitement and deeply protective of myself in a primal sort of way. Sure, I took pictures here and there — you’ve seen a few of them. But mostly I just loved being with my three little companions and minding our business.

Our daily routines were a vibe. A consistent, well-balanced diet — except for the most unusual craving for burgers. My iron has always run a little low and I stockpiled burgers through that season without apology. We prayed and meditated and journaled. I worked out. I felt creative and productive. I hibernated through the long winter months and baked a baby without feeling rushed.

And then spring hit. My belly popped just as the Cherry Blossoms bloomed and we were outside.

Something about that baby, the seasons changing — whatever it was — gave me a boost of energy. We had daily dance breaks in the living room. We grew at a steady pace. We knocked out the scary appointment with flying colors and I am so grateful for every single milestone.

It was beautiful to feel so beautiful. So grounded. So completely in the moment.

And the people who had loved me through all the seasons before this one — they showed up. My closest friends took me to the sea and we had the most amazing baby moons. Another dear friend took me for a fancy spa weekend that started with car service out to Middleburg and ended with an even greater gift of sisterhood. Thanks to the talented women in my family, I had the baby shower of my dreams. Boho Safari we called it and let me say nothing about the taco bar I still remember. Friends flew in from across the country. Family came from Nicaragua. It was better than I imagine a wedding would have been if I’d had one. Being poured into by my people was beyond words.

Pregnancy wasn’t just me mothering new life. I was being mothered by it. I have never felt more connected to the sacred feminine spirit that lives in me. Passed down by the women who came before me— my mother, my grandmother, her mother, and the generations of women whose very names were erased by circumstances that deserve a whole post of their own. I became a more deliberate and aware vessel through pregnancy and, as I joined these women in a special place in our family’s history, I felt them with me. It gave me a sense of bad ass-ness I wish I could’ve bottled up for the days that have come postpartum.

There was also something completely unexpected from this journey. Who knew that my son would build a bridge that has connected me with my foremothers this way?

He held my hyper-vigilant hand through the greatest transformation I will ever experience on this earth. He calmed my nerves for 35 whole weeks. Not a moment of panic, anxiety, existential crisis. Not a look in the mirror that made me feel less than lovely under a mask of melasma as my freckles all blended into brown clouds across my cheek bones and prominent forehead. Not even a single instance of morning sickness. And since it can’t all be perfect, let me just say, I had a serious case of ongoing heartburn and what my dentist (the same one I’ve had since 9^th grade) called one of the top three cases of gestational gingivitis he’s seen in his entire career. But that’s not the focus here!

The beauty of it all is that this little human I was creating was a life partner who accompanied me through so much before he even arrived. There were wins and deep loss — one I hold privately from this season- but I know I overcame because my son made sure I never felt alone. He was there and I have been happy to follow his lead ever since.

When you come from a long line of tough women with strong executive leadership skills (grin), we aren’t used to following. Of the women in my family, I may be the only one willing to admit that we have been missing the softness of masculine energy. Machismo is real and in Latino culture masculine energy is either dominant or useless. We are not known for raising men who strike a balance — and in doing so give us the opportunity to relish in the softness and safety of masculinity. My grandmother. My mother. Me. All bossy and stubborn. Determined and hardworking. Each of us gifted in our own way. And in some way aching for a tenderness denied, withheld, or maybe even rejected.

There is a Rupi Kaur poem that found me years ago. I won’t reproduce it here (hello copyrighting laws) — but please go find it. It’s a woman asking aloud if her having a daughter would enable her to redeem the women in her lineage. I found it in her book Milk and Honey and pasted a small print out of it above my desk. It is still a notion I think about from time to time even now that I have a son because the moral of the question feels less about gender and more about relationship for me.

What a gift it is to have been chosen told hold and shape the very energy I have always needed. That we have always deserved. For that alone, this pregnancy was f*king magical.

The moment he arrived, our village literally lit up in his presence. The way he gives to each one of us has changed us.

He is the blessing of my life.

When I shared that I was expecting, the joy in people’s reactions was priceless. The love they poured into us throughout the pregnancy — and continue to pour into us today — is so deeply affirming. So validating of every quiet decision I made along the way. Every boundary I held. Every question I didn’t answer. Every moment I chose my own knowing over someone else’s timeline for my life.

Today I can barely recall the days I wondered about my path and worried too much.

I don’t share this story to say that my path was awesome and paved with yellow bricks and diamonds in the sky. I’m putting this story down alongside the other mini-chapters I’m sharing as testimony that what is meant for you won’t miss you.

I share it because I want to look at myself in a memory arc that spans challenge, opportunity, surrender, and joy. That’s a story we are all entitled to experience. These days social media encourages us to view someone else’s happiness as an indictment of ourselves- a sign that we’re missing out or getting missed instead of feeling excited about our own possibilities.

Maybe sharing this story will offer someone a bit of encouragement to trust the process of becoming in each season of life. I know firsthand that it can go a long way.

There were literal years I was so wrapped up in doing and controlling but that one, big, most beautiful thing eclipsed it all in 8 months flat.

I’m writing this while still in transition to motherhood. It’s still somewhat fresh in my mind (except when the fog temporarily blocks it) but if there’s one thing I can certify, it’s that the things written on your heart do materialize.

And when they do — they are greater than you ever imagined.

Thanks for Reading. Stay a while. Welcome to the neighborhood. 🏡

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I recently went in for an annual exam with my OBGYN. It took several weeks to get on the books.

I don’t know if it’s just me but getting in to see your actual doctor these days feels like an achievement in itself.

I stepped into the exam room and the nurse asked my weight but I honestly didn’t know. Her last recorded weight for me was 176 lbs which was definitely not what I’m working with now. I’m somewhere under my pre-baby weight — I feel it. Clothes are loose, and my big booty is a near-distant memory.

The doctor came in bright and glowing — like the engagement rock on her finger that wasn’t there last year. I didn’t say anything. Even though this is the doctor who sees my most intimate parts, we are not girlfriends who chat about life things.

She asked if I had any questions or concerns and I came ready because this was one appointment I wasn’t going to rush through.

I need to know, I said. Am I still postpartum or am I in perimenopause?

She turned from her laptop and squared up — fully facing me, listening more carefully. What’s going on? she asked.

I told her the symptoms that have persisted. The brain fog. The loss of appetite. The sleeplessness. Some recent lower back and hip pain. All of it. I told her I’d been talking to my girlfriends — a lot — and we were all experiencing similar things. Most of them now have grown babies, have been through medical procedures, or started the transition ahead of me. Different roads, same fog.

Despite what she’d said last year, I needed an updated confirmation.

She started with the basics — my period, hot flashes. My period has actually been more regular since having the baby. The hot flashes stopped when I stopped breastfeeding. She said we could check hormones again but based on where they were last year and this information she was confident.

You’re not there yet.

I’ll take that.

But let me back up and tell you about this fog because it is literally debilitating.

Someone once said to me that the mind can sometimes be like a street you don’t want to walk down in the dark.

In the fog, I couldn’t walk it in broad daylight.

For someone who has spent a lifetime depending on — and consistently working to sharpen — her mind, that was shattering. I enjoy the company of my own thoughts. I ruminate too much, sure. But my mind has always been my most reliable instrument (besides my intuition). The thing I could count on when everything else felt uncertain.

And then it went quiet. Or not quiet exactly. Cloudy.

You’ll hear me talk about brain fog a lot in this neighborhood because it has been my most pronounced symptom — the most disorienting experience. And for a long time I couldn’t tell you where it was coming from.

I’ve already shared that I had a baby at 45. A surprise C-section at 35 weeks. But it’s more than that. I met my delivery doctor a couple of hours before he sliced through seven layers of my abdominal wall, moved my insides, yanked my baby out, and sewed me back together. Then six weeks later, “ta-da!” I was expected to what? Get back to it? My God.

In the meantime, my skin was doing things I didn’t recognize, and I wasn’t sleeping. I was irritable in ways that felt chemical, not situational. And my mind — my beloved, overworked, always-on mind — was not available to come to the phone right now.

So. Was this postpartum? Was this perimenopause? Was this just what happens when you’ve been cut in half and handed a human being to keep alive?

Here’s the thing about these two seasons overlapping — the symptoms are almost identical. Brain fog. Hair loss. Sleeplessness. Irritability. Weight changes. Joint pain. Mood swings. A heaviness that didn’t have a clean name. Postpartum or perimenopause? Your guess is as good as your doctor’s apparently.

The doctors kept telling me it was normal.

I somehow sensed they said that because they didn’t want to test me. So I pushed. Vitamin levels. Hormone levels. I checked in with a psychiatrist in addition to my therapist. I read everything I could get my hands on, trying to determine for myself where I was — postpartum or perimenopause — because the people whose job it was to tell me couldn’t seem to get there.

Friends said it was normal too. I think that was their way of telling me to be patient.

My mother said nothing. She just leaned in further — holding Numa in one arm and me in the other. There were days she was literally doing both simultaneously. I am not being metaphorical. The woman held my son with one arm and steadied me with the other and didn’t make either of us feel like a burden.

But things still weren’t adding up. I had been through a pregnancy, a traumatic delivery, major surgery, the loss of my two dogs, the collapse of my career and industry. I spent the early days of motherhood in a fog so thick I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face — and yet the prevailing medical wisdom seemed to be: give it time.

I know some people say postpartum can last up to seven years before you reconcile all the versions of yourself.

I refused to believe that could be me.

Enter: the pelvic floor therapist.

I’d heard a couple of friends mention working with one after having babies, and after enough research I decided to make an appointment. What did I have to lose besides my dignity, which motherhood had already taken in installments.

The intake consultation was ninety minutes. Measurements. Exercises. An in-depth pelvic exam. And there — finally — was a set of data-informed answers I could see, hear, and feel.

Two years postpartum and I had moderate diastasis — a separation of my ribs. My pelvic floor was weak and likely contributing to why healing was taking so long. My upper and lower abdominal muscles — above and below my scar — were out of sync, off beat, not communicating properly with my brain. My breathing was off. My oxygenation was off. My circulation was off. I was not doing Kegels correctly — or at all. And if I didn’t get my proverbial sh*t together, I was risking long-term damage that could lead to peeing my pants as I aged.

Which, fine. Probably inevitable. But still.

For the first time since delivery someone had looked at my body with real intention, asked real questions, and given me real answers. Not it’s normal. Not give it time. Actual data. A diagnosis. A path forward.

The only problem? No insurance coverage for the treatment.

Of course not.

Because this — right here — is the thing that has to be said plainly: the medical establishment and insurance companies have purposely neglected key aspects of women’s health. The intersection of postpartum and perimenopause is barely studied. Poorly understood. Routinely dismissed. Women arrive at this exact crossroads — bodies in flux, symptoms overlapping, no clean answers — and are largely left to research their way out of the fog alone. Which is what I did. Which is what so many of us do. Which should not be the standard of care for anyone.

Around the same time I was also diagnosed with severe vitamin D deficiency — prescription grade, not the over the counter type. I added B12 for energy, magnesium for sleep, creatine to hold onto muscle mass, Chinese herbs for everything. All of it helping in increments.

My relationship with food changed too. I lost joy in it — something I didn’t expect and didn’t know how to name. Coffee became comfort and fuel in equal measure. It kept me upright.

I found my way back to yoga after years away — I’d shifted to walking and light weights, less intensity, less stillness. Returning helped. But it didn’t give me the hormonal lift it once did. My body had changed the rules.

But what has truly made a difference is acupuncture. I started almost fifteen years ago to manage stress and anxiety and it became so much more than that — I genuinely believe it was key to preserving my fertility and supporting a healthy pregnancy. And then I lost access to it just as I needed it most. Postpartum. No insurance coverage. Of course.

Getting back to it has been one of the most significant parts of this healing.

And through all of it there’s a question that lingers — one I don’t always say out loud. I came to motherhood at the age that I did. Will my body know when it’s transitioning from postpartum to perimenopause? Will it be strong enough to sustain it all? Can I be the parent Numa deserves — showing up with vibrant energy and strength, meeting him where he is?

I know menopause will come for me. And I’ll be a much older mom than most when it does. I just don’t want any of it to hurt his childhood.

I don’t have a clean answer. But I went looking for one anyway.

Last year at my annual exam, my OB said I may have actually delayed perimenopause.

This week — same doctor, same office — she confirmed it. You’re not there yet.

So here we are. My body working its way back from something enormous on its own timeline, not mine. All of it: postpartum. All of it: treatable. All of it: something I had to fight to have named — because somehow once you have a baby you’re either severely depressed and on the verge of un-alive-ing yourself or you’re ‘cleared’ for sex and marathon training. There is so much more in between. And every single one of those versions of yourself that you encounter on the journey deserves attention.

If anything, this whole process has revealed how much I silenced my own body — pushed past the signals, muscled through, told myself it was normal because of what others said — until it refused to go unnoticed.

And the cost of that silence isn’t abstract. It’s specific. It’s the time I lost being fully present and joyful with my bubbly, bouncy baby while I was wandering around in a fog that didn’t have to be so thick, for so long.

That’s what I want other women to hear. Not to scare them. But to say: push for the answers. Demand the tests. Find the pelvic floor therapist. Trust what your body is telling you even when no one else will.

You are not normal. You are not fine.

You are a woman whose body just did something extraordinary — and you deserve extraordinary care.

Happy to report, I now have insurance coverage for the treatment and first appointment is next week.

Let’s heal.

Thanks for Reading. Stay a while. Welcome to the neighborhood. 🏡

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This neighborhood runs on truth-telling, lots of love, and caffeine. If you connected with something here - thank you! If you want to support my writing, please consider buying me a cafecito to keep me going.

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For the past 43 months I’ve been trying to be the old me — plus all the new MEs required to track with the baby I greet every morning. Because every day I wake up I swear he’s different. He has more words, more growth, more strength, and more hunger — not just his appetite but his eagerness to consume the world.

I know I’m not alone in saying this but most mornings I’m tired before I get out of bed.

Most days I stay there a little longer — just to take it all in — until the inevitable last minute when I have to get up because he’s ready for his lechita.

I have never been a morning person and I may never be until I have to take my son to school. Thankfully, he’s not an early riser either. Punctual but not early. At 7:29 most mornings, he opens his eyes and starts to stir. As if by instinct, he uses his body language more than spoken words — though I always get a “Días, Mama” before he starts to snuggle and nudge me the way my beloved Dog-Son Chico used to for more years than I can remember without getting emotional.

My son patiently waits for me to get my bearings. We chat or sing or get one last cuddle before he hops off the bed ahead of me and then proceeds to uncover and “help” me out of it. It’s more like him straining and me exaggerating his strength to lift my dead weight to an upright position.

This is a far cry from how my mom used to wake our house up as kids. I was always in a panic from rising to setting — jumping out of bed to get myself together, get to school, get to sports practice or a job, run back home to do homework, eat, shower, and lay down before there was time to misbehave. Life in college and grad school was basically the same but with an extra job or two and a decent amount of mischief. In my career still in a panic but for a client or my family — but I did have me some global adventures that will someday make my granddaughters and nieces proud.

But I digress.

How did I get so lucky to be matched with a person who speaks my language and yet is so different? In his brief time on this earth — as compared to mine — he is clearly the extrovert to his mother’s increasingly more introverted self. He wakes up and wants to chase life down while I’m praying to have enough energy in reserves to manage the schedule I calibrated the night before. Because that’s when I get my best work done.

Over the years I’ve tried — with limited success — to become one of those people with the storied lives that come from seizing the morning. I recently polled friends about the non-negotiables in their morning routines and I am in awe of them. Several of the mothers who tuned in said they wake up between 4:00am and 5:00am — rising to everything from coffee to workouts to prayer. And because they too are moms with careers outside the home, they do all of this before their kids wake and set their homes ablaze with chatter and needs and scurrying and hauling and feeding and packing and maybe a tantrum. Some of them with multiple children and maybe even a spouse. Like, HOW? And WHAT? I genuinely need answers. Because I know I can’t be the only one out here struggling to figure out how to get it all done while continually calibrating and still keeping all my marbles together.

In order to meet the new, bigger little person who wakes up next to me every day, routine is necessary — for both of us. But if he is constantly changing and growing, why am I out here doing the same things and expecting a different result? I think we all know what that saying says.

If there is one thing life in the MOTHERhood has taught me, it’s that I am capable of more growth and evolution than I have ever given myself credit for. Every child is completely different and none of them come with manuals but along with the magnificence of a little human comes the opportunity to learn with them and — if we’re lucky — reparent ourselves in the process. I never knew I was capable of the dexterity motherhood has asked of me. I’m out here reading and taking classes when I can — but at the end of the day I’m winging it until I land on what Numa needs. And what I can afford, of course.

As someone who is hard-charging, structured, and disciplined, routine has been my primary instrument and it has served me well. It helped me survive — and in many ways thrive — when my childhood felt unsteady or workplace pressure was intense. With Numa, routine has been essential, but not without major calibrations to account for growth spurts, teething, sickness. When I look back I realize how much I’ve had to adjust to meet him wherever he is and I honestly need to pause in moments of gratitude more often.

But the hard truth I am finally ready to admit — without shame — is that the postpartum brain fog I experienced was debilitating until relatively recently.

It was hard to notice in the first six months because I was in deep and could not see my hand if I held it up in front of my face. I was sort of all over the place and yet nowhere. I couldn’t get my feet under me for the life of me. I want to be transparent here: this was depression — but not to a degree of ideation. People often describe depression in extremes and I want to be mindful to share that there is a spectrum that is often binary with new moms — you either don’t have depression and you’re adjusting just fine or you are ready to jump off a cliff. But there are a lot of experiences in the middle.

What I was living felt like a white void like the one you see in the movies. I couldn’t see past it, and yet I barely remember much from that first year. If it wasn’t for the pictures and the snippets of moments I can recall, the only proof I lived through it all is that the baby is healthy and my loved ones haven’t written me off.

I may not remember much — but I was in constant motion, tracking with his daily growth. Moving through physical, mental, and emotional changes in leaps parallel to his without realizing it. The swelling in my body decreasing. My organs returning to their places. My mind trying to recall how to get back to work. My heart expanding every time I heard baby Numa coo.

Year two was less eclipsed but it reopened doors and welcomed anxiety back into my life. I had wrapped up breastfeeding and my body was settling into its new form — different from its old form on many accounts. The transition from physically being able to feed him left me feeling disconnected from an intimacy that had just been ours. I had to release that and adapt to where we were already going — solids, bottles, sippy cups.

Professionally, I felt pressure to find my way out of the fog quickly. I started having calls with prospective clients and collaborators but couldn’t feel myself coming back into the passion I’d always had for what I do. I had built a business at the intersection of strategic communications and diversity, equity, and inclusion — and as I returned from maternity leave, my industry began its fateful descent. I wasn’t on my game, and that was unsettling at exactly the moment I needed to be making money for more than one of us.

But the most difficult part of that year were the deep emotions — the disorientation, frustration, isolation, and sadness. I tried to think and muscle my way through it because when I looked around at the moms in my life, they seemed to have done just that. I felt weak for not being able to push through. I didn’t want to accept that it might be the hormones, or the chaos in the world flooding my empathetic spirit.

In the past year and a half I’ve thrown everything at the fog. Therapy, nutrition, exercise, rest, Epsom salt, meditation, dancing, prayer — and yes, a spicy margarita every now and then — and more prayer. I’ve changed routines and even jobs.

But first — a confession. Before the job change there was a surrender.

I had built something of my own — Mozaic Strategies — and it was a baby too. One that deserved my full attention. But I no longer had that to give. So I made a decision that felt like failure at the time and feels like wisdom now. I stepped back. I put it on hold for when I can come back to it.

In September 2025 I took a position I thought would offer what I needed — a steady income, health care, predictable work I could do in my sleep, all within the safety of a mission-driven organization so regulated it felt bulletproof. It was a way to stay in the work of diversity, equity, and inclusion but in a more manageable role and with the non-negotiables and safety net I needed. I saw it as the place I would be until Numa started Pre-K.

Then a political bro sent in some DOGE bros to dismantle inclusion across the organization. Keeping all names — including the organization’s — out of my mouth for obvious reasons.

They call it reduction in force but in real terms it was an immediate exiting of my entire division — including a young Latina I’d hired a month earlier. Four weeks of severance wasn’t negotiable and wasn’t going to take me far.

What came after was its own kind of fog. Navigating extended unemployment in a market saturated with high-caliber talent. Learning the Medicaid system. Doing the thing everyone tells you never to do — tapping into retirement funds. For the first time in my adult life, the financial discipline I’d built over decades couldn’t hold the weight of what we needed.

And if you want to know what scared me most — it wasn’t the unemployment. The only thing scarier than being ill in America is being ill or having a sick child and being uninsured in America. I lived that fear every single day until I secured temporary assistance.

All while supporting an aging parent who was very ill and needed a lot of me at a time when I had very little left to give.

All while watching my brother fight for his life — a fight that isn’t over, that I can’t fix, that I have had to learn to hold without falling apart. He’s my big brother. He was always the smartest person in my family. The strongest. The funniest. And the most mischievous. And now he’s a shadow of that person trying to come back to himself. We are on parallel tracks in that respect.

Through all of it — Numa kept waking up at or just before 7:29.

So I kept waking up too.

I had to change how I showed up on a resume. What kind of work I wanted — or felt like I could do anymore. My expectations for roles, salary, hours. All of it renegotiated. While simultaneously reconciling with the woman in the mirror. While the fog slowly, finally, started to clear.

I’ve landed somewhere new professionally. I’m still finding my footing and don’t know how long I’ll be in this space or place or position. But what I know is this: my focus now is on me and my kid being in sync through the tidal waves and the ripples. To resist the change less. To honor where it’s taking me.

Numa changes every single day and I’ve been doing my best to meet him. Somewhere in the middle of all of it, without realizing it, I’ve also been meeting myself. A new form. A new milestone. A new morning.

He didn’t come with a manual. Neither did this version of me.

But here we are. 7:29. Eyes open.

Ready for where this journey will take us next — to more self-compassion. To more writing. To higher places of testimony.

Thanks for Reading. Stay a while. Welcome to the neighborhood. 🏡

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This neighborhood runs on truth-telling, lots of love, and caffeine. If you connected with something here - thank you! If you want to support my writing, please consider buying me a cafecito to keep me going.

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He put both arms up and said up.

That look on his face — the one that melts me every dang time — and I couldn’t do it. I could not pick up my own son.

I stood there knowing something was off. That particular helplessness my pride refuses to make peace with. That ache of wanting to hold him and my body saying not right now.

I’d been here before. Almost two years earlier, in the earliest days after he arrived, I couldn’t pick him up much either. C-section recovery has rules and my body was following all of them whether I wanted it to or not. So we figured it out — pillows, skin-to-skin, him draped across me while I sat or laid down. (It was actually beautiful for bonding. I’m choosing to hold onto that.) But I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t hard to watch my family walk around the house holding him, bathing him, enjoying him, doing the things I most wanted to do, while I filmed it on the margins or sat there cinched in a faja, moving like someone replaced my spine with a truckload of blubber hanging on the thinnest of wires known as a C-section scar - that pinched and burned every time I moved.

He was a tiny premie but he was growing so fast even then. Once he hit 8 pounds there was no looking back.

By the time I was walking without pain he was already different. I took up babywearing like it was my religion because I could feel — I actually FELT it in my bones — that the window would close fast. I was right. He is forty pounds of forward momentum at two years old and the window is still technically open but I’ll be honest with you, some days it feels like it’s closing while I’m standing right in front of it. That tiny little soul I waited all this time for is running ahead of me and I know I’m not keeping up.

And that’s the part that breaks me open a little. Not the pain. Not the mirror. Not even the scoliosis scare I sat alone with for two weeks. It’s him. Running. And me — the woman who fought like hell to get here — still trying to catch up.

Let me back all the way up. Because this story doesn’t start with the hip pain of that morning I couldn’t lift him. It starts well before that.

It starts at barely 35 weeks of pregnancy.

I had a solid pregnancy in spite of all the scary geriatric mother talk. Strong. I felt powerful in a way I hadn’t expected and haven’t felt since — plump and magnificent and like my body finally understood its purpose. I had no reason to plan for a C-section. I didn’t imagine or prepare for the possibility. I did all the reading, asked all the questions, and took the regular track birthing classes that only glazed over C-sections for a whole of 5 mins. I was mentally ready for a vaginal birth and excited to finally have the home stretch of the journey to prepare my house for the biggest transformation.

And then my water broke spontaneously and everything I thought went out the window.

I don’t say any of this with bitterness — I’d do it a thousand times over a thousand for Numa — but not everything about what happened that night or in the months after was sweet and cute. It was a controlled loss of control. My body, which had been doing this extraordinary thing entirely on its own terms, suddenly became a site of intervention. And I’ve been trying to get my footing ever since.

The scar on my lower abdomen is fading now. But it’s not gone.

Six weeks postpartum, I was “cleared.”

I walked out of that office in a slow shuffle, still holding my stomach, still wearing my faja, genuinely concerned that my insides would fall out if I moved too fast. And I had just been told I was fine.

Fine.

Cleared.

For what, exactly? Apparently, everything from walking to working out to sex. No no no – seriously. I didn’t have to ask – that’s what I read was included in the “cleared” so I didn’t ask. Also, because I was too tired to form complete sentences. But I’ve thought about it a lot since then. What does cleared even mean when your body just went through the most grueling physical experience of your entire life and you are currently shuffling to your car like you’ve been in a minor car accident? I could barely drive because the foot switch from gas to brakes pinched my scar. I wasn’t even walking or sitting on a toilet without sensitivity until about week 10. Who set that standard in the first place? Clearly not a woman who ever had a C-section and definitely not one who had it at 45. But I digress.

(This is a conversation I want to keep having in this space. C-sections. What we’re told. What we’re not told. The gap between those two things. More on that soon.)

Here is the actual accounting. And I’m putting it all in one place because I’ve never actually done that before.

Mommy’s wrist — aka De Quervain’s tenosynovitis, if you want the clinical name — in both wrists within the first several months. Apparently breastfeeding positioning was slowly destroying my joints while I was busy keeping a human alive because your bones and joints are all shifted. And let’s not forget that clogged nipple which could only be resolved by Numa continuing to nurse on it – think razor blade sensations. (Breastfeeding. Also a conversation for another day. Also nothing like what you see in the brochures. Trust me – if you see a woman doing it, leave her alone because I’d bet 8 out of 10 of us literally fight for our lives to get into that eventual rhythm.)

My legs and feet swollen for nearly two weeks post partum had me out here looking like a member of Professor Clump’s family.

My hair started shedding in monstrous gobs in spite of insane doses of Nutrafol.

A body I barely recognized in the mirror — familiar enough, those are my eyes — but not the person I’d known. My best friend. My safe place.

And underneath all of it, this quiet, persistent sense that something was off. Not depression — I want to be clear about that. But a BIG feeling sitting under the weight of an overwhelming fog of hormones. A real one. The sadness of feeling too weak to be fully present with the tiny person you did all of this for. Of watching him outpace your recovery. Of doing the most powerful thing your body has ever done and coming out the other side somehow diminished. (Mental health. Postpartum and beyond. We’re going there too.)

Then the morning my hips were just too sore to ignore.

I woke up and had to roll myself out of bed because my hips felt like I’d done a squat bootcamp in my sleep and my lower back was so tender. I’d been taking regular walks to try and power through it all but I had to stop.

I went to the doctor. X-rays. They offered painkillers, which I declined. Went home. Epsom salt baths. Stretching. Trying to be smart about it.

I stopped carrying him. Even when he put his arms up. Even when he said up.

My mother stepped in. Thirty years older than me (don’t do the math) and she was stronger than me.

Do you even know how awful it is to swallow that gulp of pride? I’ve been an athlete my whole life. I never doubted I could carry a pregnancy but nothing prepared me for the even harder part which comes after the baby arrives.

The assistant at my doctor’s office called with my back X-ray results: scoliosis. Read it right from the notes — and said it could be congenital so age was likely contributing to the problem presenting itself. Or maybe an accident. Or maybe a fall.

No accident. No fall. Just a woman who grew a human being and was cut open without preparation and has been reorganizing herself — and her guts — for two years.

I sat with the word scoliosis for two weeks. Alone. Ruminating. What it might mean, what it might cost, what it might take from me in a season of life where I cannot afford to lose anything else.

Finally got an appointment with the orthopedic doctor who told me it wasn’t an accurate read. No significant deviation and it was highly likely that my hips and back were overcompensating — to help my abs.

Between the diagnosis and specialist appointment, I’d seen a pelvic floor specialist who had basically said the same. My abdominal muscles were weak, she said. My top and bottom abs weren’t communicating with my brain — not in sync, not building back, not healing the way they should.

The muscles that held Numa for months forgot how to talk to each other.

I keep sitting with that. I’m not entirely sure why.

I don’t know if this is about getting stronger. I don’t know if it’s about accepting that I am as fundamentally changed physically as I am emotionally and mentally — that the woman in the mirror isn’t a lesser version of who I was, just someone I’m still getting acquainted with.

I don’t know.

What I do know is that the quiet, insistent something isn’t right here — is what I’m trying to stand on.

Because nobody is coming to save us.

I mean that gently and I mean it completely. I have had to get very good at listening to myself in order to demand presence and curiosity from the people who are supposed to support my care, and I refuse to let the health care system shush me.

After I sorted the hip and back situation, I did something that might sound a little ridiculous.

I bought a baby carrier that holds children up to 55 pounds.

He is forty pounds. The window is still open. I am not done carrying him.

My abs are not talking to my brain yet. My scar is fading but not gone. I am 48 years old and postpartum and I’m sure perimenopause is rolling her eyes with impatience for me as I sit here tired and stretched in ways that go deeper than I can fit in this post.

All of this and I got the 55-pound carrier.

I don’t have a resolution for you. But I have mine. For now.

He still says up, by the way. Every single day. And some days now — I can.

Thanks for the company. Stay a while. Welcome to the neighborhood — we’re just getting started on this block.

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He doesn’t know about global chaos. He knows about garbage trucks and coloring and Ms. Rachel and Sesame Street. He knows that I am the first responder to his needs. He trusts I’ll come home and that I’ll always beep from the driveway.

On a (finally) sunny Saturday morning, I made his favorite banana pancakes while NPR broke the news of bombs being dropped on Tehran. He wanted more syrup. I said ok.

There’s something disorienting about that contrast — his delight against the backdrop of everything happening outside our little world. I feel ashamed to even think of complaining. But I still do it.

The world feels heavy. His spirit is light. And I am the bridge between the two.

Many of us absorb the news. Process the fear. Carry the tension. And then figure out a way to serve joy at breakfast.

For some of us who are children of immigrants, there’s something else happening too. It’s like an intergenerational nerve ending is getting pinched. Following events in foreign countries like the ones our parents came from hits different. We still have family in those places. Some of us have spent parts of our lives there. And some of us have only been there in the stories that live in the diaspora. There is also a weight in being a bridge between those worlds. I for one can imagine the fear and even feel it as if it’s proximate. I can also feel guilt for the privilege of safety. Of being able to shelter my child while so many mothers can’t. I know what they want to provide their children—every mother knows. But for some reason too many of us can’t protect our kids.

Children deserve childhood even if we didn’t have much of one ourselves. They deserve to feel safe. They should believe the world is wide and welcoming.

And parents shouldn’t have to suit up in emotional armor before we can even brush our teeth in the morning.

Inevitably, I think about my mother.

What she must have felt as a young immigrant mother raising my siblings and me mostly on her own. She arrived in this country a girl, a domestic worker, with nothing and no one. She left a country ruled by the iron fist of a U.S.-backed dictator and arrived in Washington, DC at the height of the civil rights movement as the city burned in the wake of Dr. King’s assassination.

My mother didn’t have language for “trauma” or “emotional labor” or “systemic barriers.” She just knew survival required vigilance. So she raised us on that foundation in a world that did not always welcome us. She taught us to turn fear into discipline, instability into work ethic, and exclusion into excellence.

I used to think she was just strict. Now I understand she was building our armor for the realities we would inevitably have to face. She did that while trying to make sure parts of us remained soft. But somewhere in that process, we surrendered parts of our childhood.

That’s the tension that’s coming back to me now. How can I possibly hold the tenderness of my son while preparing him for the world that is rapidly unfolding?

He won’t remember these early years.

He won’t remember the postpartum fog or how unsteady I felt – and still feel - in my new body. He won’t remember the professional pivot or the months I was barely home for bedtime. Or the plans I made and couldn’t keep because I was too exhausted.

But he’s already absorbing the things that come before formal memory. The sensations he gets from my vibe.

He watches how I respond to frustration and failure. He studies my tone. He sees whether I shrink or stand tall. He hears me cry in the dark when I think he’s asleep and he creeps over to comfort me. He is learning what power looks like. He is learning what love looks like. And he is learning what a person is allowed to be.

That realization humbles me. At times, it breaks my heart.

So maybe the question isn’t how to protect him from the world.

Maybe it’s how to raise him so he doesn’t become another source of harm within it.

How do I raise a son who understands empathy and softness without embarrassment? Strength without domination? Leadership without cruelty? How do I raise someone who lowers the temperature instead of raising it? Who proudly carries his immigrant heritage and uses it to relate to others?

Motherhood has sharpened my answers.

It’s less about shielding. More about modeling.

If I want him to be compassionate, I have to practice compassion out loud. If I want him to value women, he has to see me value myself. If I want him to be a Good Neighbor, he has to watch me be one.

Some days I’m afraid. Afraid of what he will inherit. Afraid of what I can’t control. Afraid that the world will demand he armor up the way my mother did for me. Afraid I’ll fail.

But I also know this:

My mother raised us to navigate systems without losing our dignity — to enter rooms and still remember who we are. Who could see injustice and not look away.

Now it’s my turn to do it for my little bicultural baby.

I cannot control geopolitics. I cannot out-argue cultural decay. I cannot shield him from everything, for forever.

But inside this house, we practice an imperfect but kinder life.

We practice apology. We practice gentleness. We practice repair. We practice laughter. We practice love that is not performative, but persistent. And because my son’s mother is who she is, we practice discipline and steadfastness.

Maybe that’s the assignment. Not to save the world in one lifetime. But to raise someone who makes it brighter in the next.

Every morning, he wakes up delighted to be alive.

And I choose — over and over — to meet him there.

Even when the world feels like it’s on fire.

Welcome to the neighborhood. Stay a while. It’s always better when we don’t wander alone. 🏡

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After 44 years of being who I was, a single moment rearranged everything.

Not gradually.
Not conceptually.
Physiologically.

I could look at my past through a different lens, see what was in front of me with more clear-eyed, and what was ahead with a mix of fear and curiosity I wasn’t used to carrying at the same time.

I’m a Capricorn. I pride myself on being highly motivated (ambitious) and thoughtful (calculated) — steady, loyal, practical. In my family, I was the child who learned how to navigate systems early. Doctor’s offices. Government forms. School bureaucracy. Translation. Advocacy.

Before therapy and trauma-informed work entered my vocabulary, I just called it being responsible.

That identity served me well.

But none of that prepared me for the phone call.

The morning my doctor’s office called to confirm I was pregnant, I was completely stunned. I had already taken the blood test. Instead of buying an over-the-counter one to get ahead of it, I chose to wait ten full days. It wasn’t because I wasn’t curious. It was because I knew too much. The numbers. The questions. The potential outcomes. When you’ve built a life around bracing for impact, you know how to stress yourself into a mess. Whatever the result, it would either steady me or shatter me. And at 44, I wasn’t in a rush to accelerate fate. So I held those days, and my body, like the most fragile heirloom.

The moment I heard the words, “Congratulations, you’re pregnant!” something like a power surge zipped through my body and sent my nervous system into a release…of breath, of tension, and tears that came out of nowhere.

You know how Olympians hear their score and realize they’ve won — and just inhale and release what must be a lifetime of tension? It was like that.

I danced around my living room with my dogs like a lunatic. And they jumped and barked as if they knew we were celebrating.

That YES from the Creator rewired me.

I didn’t even fully understand what it would entail, but I knew it was the beginning of something.

I grew up between two competing scripts.

One said:
Work hard. Be grateful. Climb slowly. Don’t complain.

The other said:
Why wait? You’re smart. Take up space. Ask for more.

Then add being the daughter of immigrants in the DC Area — where ambition is basically a personality trait. Where within five minutes of meeting someone you’re asked what you do and where you went to school.

My parents didn’t know the name of the ladder they wanted me to climb, but they knew it existed. They saw their bosses on it and assumed it was safer up there.

So I did what good daughters do.

I studied.
I behaved.
I overachieved.

I built a résumé that would make them proud. I entered rooms that once intimidated me. I worked in civil rights advocacy, then pivoted into corporate consulting — which felt like stepping into adulthood in big girl pants.

High-level teams.
Big strategy.
Travel.
A big promotion.

I thought that was it.

And for a while, it felt good. I was one of two Latinas in leadership roles across the U.S. footprint of a firm. I wore that like armor. Like proof that the ladder was climbable.

But it was exhausting. And I had internal questions that kept getting louder.

Is this work truly valued?
Is partnership something I’d even be considered for? Or want?
Can I keep running like this and still have a life? A baby?

Then my dad died.

And everything cracked open.

Grief doesn’t politely knock. It rearranges the furniture in your mind. Suddenly time isn’t theoretical. It’s measurable. It’s shrinking. And the things you’ve put off or wholly ignored or buried start calling.

I started noticing how much of my life revolved around proving something.

To who?
I wasn’t sure anymore.

My hair was falling out from the stress.

I prayed.
I journaled.
I moved into my own house thinking independence would quiet the unrest.

It didn’t.

What surfaced instead was this quiet, stubborn no.

No, this isn’t the only way.
No, this pace isn’t sustainable.
No, you are not obligated to bleed for rooms that barely see you.

When I ignored that no, I had a moment on a project that left me feeling like I had overstayed my welcome. If you know, you know. That subtle shift in tone. The idea that’s yours until it isn’t. The polite exclusion.

It took me back to being inside something and outside of it at the same time.

So I did something terrifying.

I left without another job in hand.

I launched my own advisory firm.

I told myself it was temporary. A one-year experiment. Worst case, I’d crawl back to a “real” job.

Instead, I figured it out. I kept it alive through a pandemic. The work wasn’t always glamorous, but it was purpose-driven and it was mine.

My hair grew back.

And still.

Something felt unfinished.

It was as if I had built the house and furnished every room — except the one that mattered most.

Motherhood.

I had my son at 45.

Later than most.
Right on time for me.

During pregnancy, I grew — and also G R E W.

Not just physically. Something internal shifted.

I became louder inside.
Less apologetic.
More rooted.

It wasn’t whimsical. There was no soft music and floating curtains. This was cellular. Like my body was remembering something ancient.

Being a vessel for my son’s life was affirming.

And when you get a yes that big, you stop being good at taking no.

Motherhood didn’t make me smaller.

It made me sharper.

Clearer about what matters. And what doesn’t.

There’s a conviction that comes when you realize you’re literally responsible for an entire human life. So much humanity and determination you can’t help but see your child in other people’s kids and want to protect them too. It’s primal.

Now my toddler is my boss. He pries my eyes open in the morning and climbs on top of me like I’m a jungle gym. I carry him even when he’s heavy because I remember the early weeks when I could barely carry myself.

The world looks different with him.

I don’t want work that competes with him or creativity squeezed into midnight scraps.

I don’t want to climb another professional mountain just to prove I can.

I want to build something that orbits my actual life.

And here’s the part that surprises even me:

I’m not scared of wanting what I want.

But I do worry about what it might cost. Financially. Professionally. Socially.

I used to think impact had to be a big thing.
Now I think it might be in all the ways – big and small – that I raise my little human in a world that desperately needs better souls to lead us.

If I can raise a son who understands empathy, matriarchy, collective responsibility — who sees women as full humans and not supporting characters — that is impact.

That is ambition.

That is legacy.

And yes, some days I still worry too much.

About money.
About relevance.
About whether society will quietly punish me for wanting motherhood to be central and not supplemental.

That fear lives here too.

But so does clarity.

Becoming his mama wasn’t a detour.

It was the pivot.

Some nights, after he falls asleep, I just sit and listen to him breathe.
No network. No title. No applause.
Just breath.
And that feels more like success than anything I’ve ever put on a résumé.

Thanks for this week’s read In the MOTHERhood! If you’re moved, go ahead and send this piece to a neighbor, friend, mama…

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It’s been all of that lately so I knew a good cry was coming.

It’s the end of the night.
The baby’s down.

And I’m trying to make a sense of life, work, and motherhood.

I slink out of bed once I know he’s asleep and head back to the living room to get myself together, but not without letting myself fall apart a little.

I mean, who am I kidding? Motherhood is hard and I’m just surprised we don’t crack more often.

Here I am with a baby who’s not really a baby anymore. He’s a supersized toddler. And while I’m really proud to have created this giant little human, I hold that with a bit of sadness for what I’ve missed—and what I’m missing now that I’m trying to find my footing in a new job that demands more from me than my baby does.

I don’t know.

I just know that the most important person in my world is growing faster than I can keep up with in the hailstorm that is adulting.

He’s heavy to carry but I refuse to let the opportunity go. When he asks for “up,” I think of all the times I couldn’t hold him and how this might be the last time he asks.

I barely held him when he was a newborn because for the first ten weeks I could barely hold myself. The simplest task of standing up had me holding my abs because it felt like my guts were going to fall out.

I barely held him because I accepted help from my tribe who love him fiercely and made sure he was never not held.

These are the places my mind goes when the world has run me down and my emotions and fatigue break through.

My hair is still falling out. Still.

I miss my bouncy curls.

Maybe it’s postpartum. Or perimenopause. Or just stress. Whatever it is, my hair is fried and it’s falling out every day. All the time.

So here I am. On a Friday night. Crying in my Korean face mask.

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Maybe I’m crying because I’m starting to notice my face changing.
That’s natural. That’s normal. I get it and I’m not scared of it per se– but I’m not ready to look in the mirror and get used to the person looking back at me. We’ve been getting acquainted for a couple years but I’m just not ready.

Is it wrong to want a little glow that reminds me of the person I was for 44 years-- or better yet, the one I was when I was pregnant — she was actually my favorite me. Of my whole life.

Plump. Happy. Sunspots, melasma, and all.
She was this jolly person with energy. Strength.
Nobody could say a single thing to me. Not only did I create a human — that human was a ‘he.’ Like… I made a penis. You can’t tell me I’m not magnificent.

Anyway.

I’m crying in my face mask because I miss K-dramas.
I miss binge-watching an entire sweet romance between Korean characters with Spanish language voice overs (makes it feel like I’m watching a novela). Eating takeout while navigating simple gestures and intricate plot twists while letting my couch hug me. Yes, I cry for that.

And maybe I’m crying because I miss my friends.

I miss being a good friend.
I miss my chosen sisterhood cultivated over many years— spontaneous dinners, long phone calls that turn into longer ones, the ease of showing up without checking a calendar three times first.

There just aren’t enough hours anymore.
And the hours that do exist are already promised to someone who needs me in a deeper way.

On nights like tonight — when I know they’d be the best company —
I’m not texting to meet up or heading over to their homes.
I’m scrolling through pictures instead.

Airports. Beaches. Late night antics.
Tables full of food we took pictures of before exchanging bite-sized tastes of one another’s dishes.
Inside jokes that still make me laugh out loud.

Stories about fashion bloopers, ex-crushes or husbands, or that time one of us – fill in the blank.
In those pictures are versions of myself that look carefree, well-rested, and a little reckless in the best way.

I miss the version of me who had time to be fully present with them.
And I hold onto the hope that she’s not gone — just… away for a bit longer.

It might sound awful but I miss the days I wasn’t working.

Both right after I had my baby and later, after a layoff.
Yes, I was stressed. Yes, I worried about money and what came next.
But there was also a strange freedom in not carrying the daily pressure of work.

What I miss even more are the weeks when the end of a workday didn’t leave me so depleted that all my son got was whatever scraps of energy I had left.
Some nights, exhaustion feels like the only thing I truly clocked in for.

It pains me to work so I can pay someone else to enjoy the hours when my son is full of life. To miss the moments of his day I can’t possibly recapture.

It seems the only thing — aside from this expensive face mask — that actually restores me is climbing into bed beside my little co-sleeper.

I lay down quietly.
He senses I’m there and, without fully waking, makes his way toward me in tiny movements.
A hand. A foot. Sometimes a kick. More often, a warm little back pressing against my stomach as he tucks himself in the position he curled up for nearly 8 months.

And that contact —
that silent, instinctual knowing that we belong near each other —
is what brings me back to life.

It’s what sends me into the next morning ready to face the world again.

But not tonight.

Tonight I’m just letting it out.
Hoping this fancy caviar-collagen magical mask my best friend sent me for my birthday will soothe me and keep my dreams of glass skin alive.

Because I can’t go to the spa.
But I can hold onto a little self-care while he’s down.

While I’m picking up toy garbage trucks and Little People figurines and MAGNA-TILES-- and that wet diaper I lost track of ninety seconds after changing him because I had to chase him down the hall.

Tonight, this is the release.

The clearing I know will make space for the joy he will fill it with over the weekend.

Some Friday nights are for crying in a Korean face mask because it offers the comfort I need and the self-care I rarely give myself during the week.

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In the MOTHERhood all the lessons and small victories and quiet losses and fails teach us collective care. We learn that foundational practice from mothers.

They lead, bend, stretch, and sacrifice so that our childhoods can be slightly—or significantly—better than their own. In ways both soft and hard, visible and invisible, somewhere in each of our orbits is a woman who became a mother and, in doing so, came to understand the deep interconnectedness of life.

Regardless of what systems they live under or uphold, it’s the mothers who show us how to navigate the world in relationship to - and with - others.

While I believe in honoring the many forms of motherhood, caretaking, and family. There is something only a mother can feel down in her bones. That thing that makes her willing to lay down her life for her child without flinching. The way she can see another human being - not as a stranger, but as someone’s child. As her own.

Some people call this a mother’s heart. And I genuinely believe that instinct is ancient. Yes, it’s genetic but it’s also something I can only describe as an essence. It traveled through time to me and I feel it in a way I never felt before I had a child of my own.

The night my grandmother died, my uncle called my mom from their mother’s bedside. As my grandmother’s light faded, I could hear the weight in his voice through the phone. When my mom hung up, the energy in the room shifted. As if by unspoken assignment, everyone in the house moved quickly and quietly to make arrangements for flights, bags…lots of bags that would carry clothes, shoes, soap, toothbrushes, razors, medicine, candy. We drove to the 24-hour pharmacy for anything we could get our hands on that would be useful for those welcoming her home. Because we knew my mom wouldn’t just be flying to hopefully arrive in time to see her dying mother for the last time, she was going to a village of family and neighbors lacking basic resources. My sister and I knew our mom would have to carry a heavy heart and as many things as possible, but it didn’t weigh on her as responsibility – it was care. Even when she was the one who needed it.

Then the phone rang again.

My grandmother had just taken her last breath. It was too late. My mom wouldn’t see her alive again. Not to say goodbye or see a single breath.

I watched my mother’s face stunned and empty before it collapsed. For the first time, I saw her not as the powerful woman who held everything together – the leader of family and an extended network of friends and neighbors. I saw her transform into a small child before my eyes.

She curled into herself and cried out in a way that split my heart open. A way I’ve only heard a child cry out. A cry that can only be soothed by a mother.

In that moment, I understood something I would not have language for until years later: the woman I depended on had been shaped by another woman’s mothering. Her values. Her resilience. Her sense of community and caring for everyone. Her way of loving.

I used to think that all the strong willed and warrior-women in my family were connected by the fact that we are an army of daughters. Determined. Resilient. Survivors.

I was wrong.

The women in my family that defy duty and taboos and even gravity are the mothers.

That inheritance—that sense of connectedness with others—is the soil beneath my collectivist family and culture. It is why suffering is never abstract or meant to be carried alone. Why other people’s children are never just “someone else’s problem.” My mother modeled that for me my whole life.

It is why the countless stories of families ripped apart by the immigration system have always felt unbearably close.

The dehumanization of people who look like me – like my family and friends and neighbors - has become political sport in this country and it pulses with danger that keeps me on high alert. As a lifelong activist I want to be outside, standing up for my community. It’s been hard to cheer from the sidelines and not feel like a punk but, as my son’s only parent, the risk is too high. The possible outcomes for a brown woman – citizen or not - too unsafe.

Having a baby has not only made me feel more vulnerable than I ever imagined, but it is teaching me to accept help – especially from mothers. And let me just say that I stand in awe of the mothers who are standing in the gaps between community and danger and showing up for all of us.

Renee Nicole Good dropped her kid off at school and put her entire existence on the line for her community and mine.

I don’t have to have known her – the fact that she was a mother tells me everything I need to know about her.

Why she was on the road that day.
Who she was protecting.
What she hoped would be different.

There are neighbors.
And then there are mothers who are neighbors.

These days, my son and I end every night singing Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood song. His face lights up as he points to the familiar picture on the page. And my mind often returns to that story Mr. Rogers used to tell about his own mother: how, in times of chaos, she taught him to look for the helpers.

Even the man who taught generations how to be a good neighbor learned it first from his mother.

Renee Nicole Good was a neighbor and a helper.

And whatever else is said about her, whatever politics surround her story, this is the truth I hold:

She was a good neighbor. The kind I learned about in the Bible and in the communities I grew up in. The kind neighbor my grandmother taught my mother to be.

That is one of the highest forms of love I know.

Lately, I’ve been asking myself how I can be a better neighbor as I navigate motherhood.

What am I modeling for my son about community and collective care?

My hope is that he will grow up understanding that being a good neighbor is not about comfort, or convenience, or even agreement. It is about a commitment to share, care, and support one another.

Motherhood is humbling but we don’t have to survive it alone. We came into this world through a helper and it is our birthright and responsibility to share that inheritance with others.

May we raise the neighbors who are helpers.
And may we never forget the mother-helpers who carry a legacy of love.

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